Senior Platform Engineer

About Forem

Forem is a company committed to empowering community. We operate DEV, CodeNewbie, and our underlying platform, Forem.

Why Join us:

• Massive Market: Social networking and online community continues to be one of the biggest possible markets. Forem has the potential to be an Internet scale business.
• Demonstrated Traction: The Forem community, DEV, has over 800,000 registered members and reaches more developers each month than Hacker News.
• Platform Business Model: Forem allows anyone to stand up their own independent social network. We align our business aspirations with the success of our community leaders.
• Creator Driven: Forem allows creators to build more deep and meaningful connections to their audience, a trend that is booming with Substack, Patreon, TikTok/Instagram influencers, and beyond.
• Enterprise Interest and Access: Over 3,000 organizations like Stripe, Shopify, Twilio, Heroku, Google Cloud, etc. have organically joined DEV. Though the company is early in its Go-to-Market motion, we have direct access to our target customers via DEV, and have already signed deals with New Relic, Snyk, and the Interledger Foundation.
• Compelling Open-Source Platform Model: A strong contributing community of ~600 developers and 17k+ GitHub stars.
• Strong Company Mission: To create inclusive communities and empower an independent, human-centered web.

We are a remote-first team and have no physical office. We have team members all across the world, in a wide span of time zones. We prioritize asynchronous productivity and have just one full-team required meeting per week. Our work culture relies on trust and the ability to work independently, though we also collaborate in real-time when a situation calls for that level of coordination. We value emotional intelligence, learning, and growth, and are excited to identify diverse and well-rounded candidates who share our passion and priorities.

We understand that many companies have an uncommunicative and time intensive application processes. At Forem, we strive for transparency. Our hiring process starts with a questionnaire and is followed by 1-3 rounds of panel interviews. We strive to get back to candidates within 2 weeks of each step of the process.

The Position

We’re looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to help deliver on our platform and infrastructure needs across DEV (dev.to) and Forem Cloud. You’ll be responsible for deploying and maintaining multiple instances of our software on Forem Cloud to ensure our customers have a solid hosting experience for their communities. Additionally, you will work closely with engineering across the organization on all aspects of site reliability, performance, automated testing, and platform/support engineering as we operate our own communities, including DEV. The starting salary range for this role is $145,000 - $157,000 plus equity and is not location-based.

In this role, you'll be accountable for:

• Deploy and manage multiple instances of our Ruby on Rails application
• Design automated software and product upgrades, change management, and release management solutions
• Monitor and assess the overall health of our systems
• Troubleshoot/Debug priority incidents, facilitate blameless post-mortems and ensure permanent closure of incidents
• Participate in our support coverage as needed
• Identify and drive opportunities to optimize performance across the entire stack (hardware, software, application, and network)

Requirements

• Familiarity with our cloud hosting stack — especially some/all of AWS, Linux+systemd, and Ansible+Terraform for stack management
• Capable of maintaining and crafting monitoring practices across the entire infrastructure and organization
• Proficient and comfortable using a diverse set of monitoring tools for debugging and finding information
• Forward-thinking in identifying optimization and scaling problems before they occur
• Calm and and communicative during outages
• Understands the inner workings of our datastores and can use that knowledge to help make performance informed decisions.

Our Hiring Process

We want our candidates to have the best possible interview experience because this is as much about you finding the right fit as it is us finding a great new addition to the team. We value candidates from all backgrounds and experiences and want our interview process to be representative of that. Here is what you can expect:

1. Application review
2. Round 1: Hiring manager interview (60 mins)
3. Round 2: A short take-home exercise that is meant to mimic real-life work (90 mins, self-timed)
4. Round 3: Team interview covering your technical experience and your soft skills in technical leadership (90 mins)
5. Round 4: Co-founder interview intended to cover your skills in collaboration and communication, as well as to provide a final opportunity for you to ask any lingering questions about the company strategy and progress (45 mins)

Benefits

Work/life balance and ensuring that folks have what they need for working and for life is incredibly important to us. Below are some of the benefits we offer:

• Unlimited PTO with a minimum requirement
• Generous employee equity
• A remote-first, fully-distributed team that encourages schedule flexibility
• A monthly wellness stipend to keep you at your peak
• Free mental health services
• Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage (U.S. only)
• An annual professional development budget to keep you learning and growing
• Office setup budget to make sure you have everything you need to work effectively wherever you are
• 401K (U.S. Only)