Gruntwork Careers

Gruntwork Careers

Seeking qualified grunts.

Focused on improving humanity's most important invention: Software.

Our mission is to make it 10x easier to understand, build, and deploy software (see our mission and vision page for more details). If you're passionate about making software 10x better and believe you can make a significant impact, we'd love to hear from you.

Gruntwork is a Human-Friendly Company.

We aim to build a company:

  • Where you get to take on big challenges, but the hours are reasonable.
  • Where everyone is treated fairly and with respect, but where disagreement is welcome.
  • Where the team takes great pride in our craft, but also gets things done.
  • Where we are all focused on advancing the company's mission, but get plenty of time off.
  • That is welcoming, safe, and inclusive for people of all backgrounds and identities.

In short, we want to work on interesting problems, with interesting people, while leading interesting lives.

How We Work

Check out How we built a distributed, self-funded, family-friendly, profitable startup and How we got to $1 million in annual recurring revenue with $0 in fundraising for all the details on what we do, how we fund it, how we hire, and how we work.

Benefits

Our benefits reflect our values. We believe compensation should be fair, transparent, and generous. We hire Grunts in many countries, so some details may vary.

  • Location Independent, Above-Market Salary. To reduce bias and increase transparency, we compute all salaries using formulas. The formula factors in your title and uses a multiplier to produce a result that's above market for that title. Our salaries are location independent.
  • Equity. To reduce bias and increase transparency, we compute all stock grants using formulas. The formula for equity factors in your title and your employee number. Moreover, we offer a Change in Control Bonus Plan, inspired by Progressive Equity, where if there is a large exit event, employees end up with a larger portion of the proceeds (rather than the founders hogging it all).
  • Profit-Sharing Bonus. We set aside a pot of money at the end of each year based on profits and distribute bonuses according to a formula that uses as inputs your level within the company and the length of your tenure at the company.
  • Hardware Budget. We'll buy you a brand new 16" Apple MacBook Pro (or other computer of your choosing of equivalent value) upon joining. It will be owned by you, not the company.
  • Personal Budget. We'll give you a personal budget of $1,000 USD per month to spend on your workspace (e.g., a co-working space), health (e.g., gym, yoga), time (e.g., babysitter), and/or learning (e.g., books, courses).
  • Medical/Dental/Vision Insurance. We offer a range of high-quality plans with a large portion paid by the company. For countries other than the US, this includes extra coverage on top of your statutory insurance.

In addition to the global benefits listed above, we have some US-specific benefits as well:

  • FSA and HSAs. We don't contribute to these accounts, but we do offer them as an option.
  • 401(k). We contribute a portion of your salary to your 401(k).
  • Disability insurance. If you get disabled, we have a policy that will pay out a portion of your salary.

100% Remote

Gruntwork is a remote-first company. That means you can work from home, a co-working space, cafe, or wherever else you prefer, there's no commute, and you have complete control over your work hours. To allow at least a few hours of overlap between all employees for the occasional live meeting or pair-coding session, we are currently hiring from most countries in the time zones between GMT-7 (e.g. California, USA) to GMT+2 (e.g., Berlin, Germany).

Life First, Then Work

We believe in planning our work around our lives, not the other way around. To help achieve that we offer:

  • Remote work that lets you control your hours and physical location.
  • Normal working hours that usually amount to not more than ~40h per week, and no working on weekends or holidays.
  • Deliberate project planning that takes into account the time zone of all team members.
  • A minimum vacation policy where you must take at least 4 weeks per year away from work.
  • No one carrying a pager and no on-call rotation. We enable this by only offering support contracts with SLAs of responses on business days / hours only.

Open Positions

We are always ready to add the next Grunt, but as a 100% bootstrapped company, we only hire when our revenue supports it, so timing matters. If you're inspired by what you've seen and believe in a little serendipity, we would love to hear from you. Here are the positions we're currently looking for:

Software Engineering

Principal Product Manager

USA time zones

About this role

Gruntwork has built a $5M+ ARR business serving 300 customers with zero outside capital by building the best way in the world to create a DevOps foundation. Now we're ready to take 3 key products to the next level:

  • Gruntwork Library
  • Gruntwork Pipelines
  • Gruntwork Reference Architecture

This is an opportunity to develop new product paradigms, work with customers at both leading-edge startups and name-brand enterprises, and to make significant impact by enabling these products to reach their full potential. You'll do this by working directly with the founders, our head of product design, and a highly skilled engineering team.

What You'll Work On

  • Gruntwork Library. You will be the owner of our core product, Gruntwork Library, a collection of DevOps best practices that includes nearly 300 reusable, battle-tested, production-grade infrastructure modules for AWS written in Terraform, Go, Bash, and Python. We are ready to re-imagine this product as a next-generation way to deliver best practices from our DevOps experts to thousands of end users.
  • Gruntwork Pipelines. You'll also be the owner of Gruntwork Pipelines, which configures off-the-shelf CI systems like GitHub Actions and GitLab to function as a secure and streamlined GitOps infrastructure pipeline. We see an opportunity to develop this product to drive significantly more customer value.
  • Gruntwork Reference Architecture. Finally, you'll be the owner of Gruntwork Reference Architecture, an opinionated, end-to-end tech stack built on top of Gruntwork Library that we can deploy into a customer's AWS accounts in just days. You'll be responsible for defining the next-generation way that customers deploy new architectures.
  • Product synergies. Each of these products makes the other more valuable. A key part of your work will be finding the high-leverage connection points that can drive outsize impact for the Gruntwork product portfolio as a whole.
  • Drive our product management practices. Help improve how we build products as a company by streamlining all of our product management processes, including setting the product strategy, managing the road map, user testing, user story mapping, issue tracking, backlog grooming, sprint planning and execution, customer research, and more.
  • Work alongside engineering and design. You'll serve as one member of a "trio" that includes an engineering manager and product designer. You'll collaborate with your colleagues on the vision, usability, and business viability of this new product, and take primary responsibility for our ability to execute. Further, you'll work directly with and report to our co-founder and Chief Product Officer.
  • Work alongside customers. Working directly with customers to see how they use the product and putting in place product-driven improvements to support their success will be a key part of your role.

Your Ideal Background

  • Product Ops. You have proven experience setting up a "product operating system" for your teams, including designing product management processes, leading meetings effectively, and setting a culture of continually making impact.
  • Product discovery. You have a proven ability for translating a chaotic cloud of possibilities into a concrete product strategy. You know how to query customers to get key insights. You can translate those insights into genuine innovation and a coherent and delightful product.
  • Product delivery. You have shipped many high-impact products in your time, enough to know the failure modes and the path to success. You have the experience to know what kind of process leads to shipping impactful work on a regular cadence.
  • Software engineering and/or DevOps expertise. To create products in our space, you must be able to quickly build a deep understanding of our domain: DevOps, AWS, cloud software, software delivery, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code. Prior experience in software engineering, working on dev tools, or other technical domains is required.
  • Values. You are inspired by our values. Bonus points for a sense of humor, empathy, and curiosity.

Compatible time zones

You'll be working with a team in the US time zones, so you can be located in almost any country as long as your time zone is no further west than Los Angeles (GMT-8/GMT-7) and no further east than New York (GMT-5/GMT-4). We've found that when everyone on the team is located in similar time zones, it's easier to collaborate and there's much less pressure to stay up late or get up early, so this is a hard constraint, even if you're willing to work hours different from your current time zone.

Help us a create a fundamentally better DevOps experience!

If you're excited by the above:
Apply Now

Software Engineering

Principal Software Engineer - IaC Library & Platform

We're also hiring at the senior level for this role.

USA time zones

We are not actively hiring for this role.

However, we plan to hire additional engineers later this year. We invite you to apply today, but please understand that we may not review your submission until we resume hiring for this role.

About this role

Gruntwork delivers an end-to-end, best-practices infrastructure on AWS in just days, all as a product. We're known world-wide for DevOps thought leadership, and for our popular open source tools, Terragrunt and Terratest. In this role, you’ll collaborate with other senior-level engineers to define the next generation of AWS and DevOps best practices, codify them for use by thousands of engineers, and design a next-level experience for implementing, operating and understanding them.

What you'll work on

  • Build a better DevOps experience. We have a unique product that generates complete, multi-account AWS architectures for Terraform and Terragrunt in just a few hours using a collection of internal Golang tools. Help us take this to the next level by using that product to deliver prod architectures directly to customers, and then leveraging their feedback for improvements. Better yet, help us get to the point where the entire experience is completely automated or self-service.
  • Codify AWS and Terraform best practices. Customers look to Gruntwork to share the best way to launch on AWS. Discover AWS and Terraform best practices, and then codify them as repeatable patterns that Gruntwork customers can pull off the shelf.
  • Integrate with the Gruntwork platform. Integrate your product work with our company-wide platform, which consists of a REST API (Next.js/Typescript), a web-based single-page app (Next.js/React/Typescript, Tailwind), and a first-class CLI tool (Go).
  • Build out the Infrastructure as Code Library. Create and maintain reusable infrastructure modules for a variety of infrastructure (e.g., EKS, ECS, RDS, VPC, Lambda, EC2, S3, ElastiCache, etc.), using a variety of tools (e.g., Terraform, Go, Python, Bash, Docker, Packer, etc.) on AWS.
  • Contribute to open source. Contribute to our open source projects as needed, including Terragrunt, Terratest, cloud-nuke, bash-commons, and more.
  • Train and mentor. Play to your strengths and areas of expertise by not only writing code and working on the product but also by sharing knowledge and mentoring both other team members and our customers in those areas.
  • Support customers. Gruntwork is a small, distributed, self-funded, profitable startup, so we'll ask you to provide a limited amount of support to enable learning directly from customers about how we can improve and continue achieving our vision of making it easier to understand, build, and deploy software.

Your ideal background

You should meet some of these requirements, but you don't need to meet all of them. As a company, we look for people who can leverage their existing skills to make significant impact in the near term. As an individual, you are likely looking for a growth opportunity, a core part of which is building new skills.

  • You know how to write code across the stack and have experience in one or more of the following: Go, C++, Python, Typescript, Bash, React, Next.js
  • You have production-level experience with AWS.
  • You have expertise in one or more of the following: Kubernetes (any managed offering, preferably EKS), ECS<, EC2, Lambda / Serverless, API Gateway, RDS, S3, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon GuardDuty, IAM, VPC, VPN.
  • You have worked with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools like CloudFormation, CDK, or Pulumi in prod.
  • You have experience achieving compliance and going through audits (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA, vendor, etc).
  • You have a strong background in software engineering.
  • You have strong communication skills in English and are comfortable engaging with external customers.

Your ideal values

  • You have a passion for imparting best practices to other developers.
  • But you would rather invest the time to automate a problem than do the same work again.
  • You have a passion for learning (new technologies and languages specifically).
  • But you are motivated most by making impact.
  • You are inspired by our values (bonus points for a sense of humor, empathy, and curiosity).

Compatible time zones

You'll be working with a team in the US time zones, so you can be located in almost any country as long as your typical time zone is no further west than Los Angeles (GMT-8/GMT-7) and no further east than New York (GMT-5/GMT-4). We've found that when everyone on the team is located in similar time zones, it's easier to collaborate and there's much less pressure to stay up late or get up early, so this is a hard constraint, even if you're willing to work hours different from your current time zone.

Help us a create a fundamentally better DevOps experience!

If you're excited by the above:
Apply Now

Senior Software Engineer - IaC Library & Platform

We're also hiring at the principal level for this role.

USA time zones

We are not actively hiring for this role.

However, we plan to hire additional engineers later this year. We invite you to apply today, but please understand that we may not review your submission until we resume hiring for this role.

About this role

Gruntwork delivers an end-to-end, best-practices infrastructure on AWS in just days, all as a product. We're known world-wide for DevOps thought leadership, and for our popular open source tools, Terragrunt and Terratest. In this role, you’ll collaborate with other senior-level engineers to define the next generation of AWS and DevOps best practices, codify them for use by thousands of engineers, and design a next-level experience for implementing, operating and understanding them.

What you'll work on

  • Build a better DevOps experience. We have a unique product that generates complete, multi-account AWS architectures for Terraform and Terragrunt in just a few hours using a collection of internal Golang tools. Help us take this to the next level by using that product to deliver prod architectures directly to customers, and then leveraging their feedback for improvements. Better yet, help us get to the point where the entire experience is completely automated or self-service.
  • Codify AWS and Terraform best practices. Customers look to Gruntwork to share the best way to launch on AWS. Discover AWS and Terraform best practices, and then codify them as repeatable patterns that Gruntwork customers can pull off the shelf.
  • Integrate with the Gruntwork platform. Integrate your product work with our company-wide platform, which consists of a REST API (Next.js/Typescript), a web-based single-page app (Next.js/React/Typescript, Tailwind), and a first-class CLI tool (Go).
  • Build out the Infrastructure as Code Library. Create and maintain reusable infrastructure modules for a variety of infrastructure (e.g., EKS, ECS, RDS, VPC, Lambda, EC2, S3, ElastiCache, etc.), using a variety of tools (e.g., Terraform, Go, Python, Bash, Docker, Packer, etc.) on AWS.
  • Contribute to open source. Contribute to our open source projects as needed, including Terragrunt, Terratest, cloud-nuke, bash-commons, and more.
  • Train and mentor. Play to your strengths and areas of expertise by not only writing code and working on the product but also by sharing knowledge and mentoring both other team members and our customers in those areas.
  • Support customers. Gruntwork is a small, distributed, self-funded, profitable startup, so we'll ask you to provide a limited amount of support to enable learning directly from customers about how we can improve and continue achieving our vision of making it easier to understand, build, and deploy software.

Your ideal background

You should meet some of these requirements, but you don't need to meet all of them. As a company, we look for people who can leverage their existing skills to make significant impact in the near term. As an individual, you are likely looking for a growth opportunity, a core part of which is building new skills.

  • You know how to write code across the stack and have experience in one or more of the following: Go, C++, Python, Typescript, Bash, React, Next.js
  • You have production-level experience with AWS.
  • You have expertise in one or more of the following: Kubernetes (any managed offering, preferably EKS), ECS<, EC2, Lambda / Serverless, API Gateway, RDS, S3, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon GuardDuty, IAM, VPC, VPN.
  • You have worked with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools like CloudFormation, CDK, or Pulumi in prod.
  • You have experience achieving compliance and going through audits (e.g., SOC2, HIPAA, vendor, etc).
  • You have a strong background in software engineering.
  • You have strong communication skills in English and are comfortable engaging with external customers.

Your ideal values

  • You have a passion for imparting best practices to other developers.
  • But you would rather invest the time to automate a problem than do the same work again.
  • You have a passion for learning (new technologies and languages specifically).
  • But you are motivated most by making impact.
  • You are inspired by our values (bonus points for a sense of humor, empathy, and curiosity).

Compatible time zones

You'll be working with a team in the US time zones, so you can be located in almost any country as long as your typical time zone is no further west than Los Angeles (GMT-8/GMT-7) and no further east than New York (GMT-5/GMT-4). We've found that when everyone on the team is located in similar time zones, it's easier to collaborate and there's much less pressure to stay up late or get up early, so this is a hard constraint, even if you're willing to work hours different from your current time zone.

Help us a create a fundamentally better DevOps experience!

If you're excited by the above:
Apply Now