DevOps Sales Engineer

Gruntwork

Gruntwork is 100% remote. You can work from anywhere in North America (preferably USA or Canada) for this role.
What's the opportunity?
As a Gruntwork DevOps Sales Engineer, you'll work directly with customers ranging from startups to scale-ups to enterprises to help them evaluate Gruntwork on a technical level. You'll also work on improving the evaluation process itself by coming up with new ways to demo the Gruntwork product and creating small enhancements to the product that open up new markets like migrating users from Heroku or CloudFormation. Ideally, you can blog about what you learn, or publish your tooling as open source.
Gruntwork is a different type of company with a different type of sales ethos. We serve two key stakeholders: (1) our customers and (2) Gruntwork itself. For customers, our mission is to help them make the best possible decision for setting up their AWS and Terraform infrastructure, whether that includes Gruntwork solutions or not. For Gruntwork, our mission is to help customers understand how the Gruntwork product meets our customers' needs. When we achieve both our missions, our sales performance takes care of itself.
As the second DevOps sales engineer, your success will make a significant impact on the overall growth of the company. You'll work closely with our principal sales engineer, other Gruntwork software engineers, and one of the founders. Your growth path in this role could be as either a star individual contributor or team lead (at Gruntwork, we value IC and management roles equally), either on the sales engineer track, or an adjacent one such as software engineer or developer evangelist.
What You'll Work On
  • Understand customer requirements. The first rule of working with customers is to understand their needs. You'll work with customers to identify their requirements and in some cases help to define them.
  • Showcase the product. Show customers how the Gruntwork product works. Answer both their high-level strategic questions and low-level technical questions. When necessary, collaborate with the engineering team to answer a question or build your knowledge.
  • Develop proofs of concept. When we find a new customer opportunity or market segment, a little tooling and docs could go a long way. You'll study the new opportunity, propose a lightweight deliverable and implement it.
  • Write blog posts. Share recent insights as a post on the Gruntwork blog, which has received millions of views.
  • Work with a stellar team. You'll work with two teams. You'll collaborate with a team of industry-leading software and DevOps engineers that have written the open source tools and battle-tested, production-grade infrastructure-as-code for which Gruntwork is famous. In addition, you'll be part of the (someday famous) Gruntwork sales team.
Benefits
  • Above-Market Salary. To reduce bias and increase transparency, we compute all salaries using formulas. The formula factors in your title and location and uses a multiplier to produce a result that's above market for that title and location.
  • 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.
  • Performance Bonus. We give performance-based bonuses as often as once a quarter, depending on your performance. NOTE: We have not yet decided on a commission structure, if any.
  • Equity. We grant equity to all new Grunts, with an opportunity to gain more as you earn promotions.
  • Medical/Dental/Vision Insurance. We offer a range of high-quality plans with a large portion paid by the company.
  • FSA and HSAs. We don't contribute to these accounts, but we do offer them as an option.
  • Pension/401(k). We contribute a portion of your salary to your pension or 401(k).
  • Disability insurance. If you get disabled, we have a policy that will pay out a portion of your salary.
  • Hardware budget. We'll buy you a brand new Apple M1 Max laptop upon joining. It will be owned by you, not the company.
  • Personal Budget. We'll give you a personal budget of one thousand dollars 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).
  • Minimum Vacation. We require that you take at least 4 weeks of vacation per year. And we'll track it to make sure you do!
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.
What time zones do we work in?
While Gruntwork generally hires anywhere between San Francisco and Berlin, candidates for this role must be within the GMT-8 to GMT-3 time zones, with a preference for being located in the USA or Canada. We expect you'll work primarily with customers and fellow Grunts in those time zones, with limited engagement with customers worldwide and Grunts in Europe. Working during reasonable hours is a priority for us.
Skills & Requirements
  • Significant experience with Terraform and AWS. You have used Terraform in depth and you know both its charm and its challenges. You've deployed many resources to AWS and run services in prod. There is a special authority that comes from having been in the trenches, so this is the one hard requirement for this role.
  • Interest in helping others. You enjoy engaging with and presenting to others. You've experienced situations where you worked directly with stakeholders and it suited you.
  • Interest in hacking. You like coding, tinkering, putting together quick demos, and showcasing proofs of concept. If there is a need to implement a narrowly-scoped deliverable for a customer, you see this as a fun opportunity.
  • Moral grounding. You feel comfortable saying no when necessary or acknowledging the limits of our product so that we can all sleep better at night. In general, you do the right thing for customers, for Gruntwork, and for yourself.
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