The time has come for me to move on from Engine Yard, so Engine Yard need someone to replace me. It's an excellent company to work for, the best job I've had so far. If I wasn't going to 37signals I'd not be leaving.
The Company ------------------------------------------------- http://www.engineyard.com/ Engine Yard is a well known Ruby on Rails hosting company based in San Francisco. They've sponsored a number of conferences and supported a bunch of open source software, paying developers to work on them full time, including Rails, jRuby, Rubinius and Fog. There are about 100 people in the company. It has had about $38 million of VC funding, if you care about that sort of thing. The Job ------------------------------------------------- An Application Support Engineer is someone who has a lot of experience with both Ruby and Rails applications *and* servers and hosting. We provide the link between the application developers (who often aren't great on the server side) and the servers themselves. A lot of the job is answering support tickets from customers (mostly the application developers, never end users) about things like performance issues, adding in new services such as sphinx or memcached, or just providing advice on the best way to do something. The job is more sysadmin than developer, though most of us still write code, and often code internal support tools. Though the role is classed as Support the job can be very involved technically. For instance I have just been involved in a 3+ month project to move all our customers to new infrastructure including working with our largest customer (they're huge) to fix emergent performance issues. There is a lot of scope for someone who is intelligent and likes to take initiatives to progress in the department and company by finding and fulfilling needs, or making improvements. For this job you would be a contractor, that's the way it has to be unless you can be employed by a US company directly because of your particular circumstances. The wage is whatever you negotiate, it depends on your skills and experience, probably a good bet is high 20 to low 40 k£, ymmv :) There is no holiday pay, the wage you negotiate needs to cover not being paid during your days off. This actually works out well. You would be working from home UK hours, primarily with the other people in the EU team, at this point that's Tim L. from Macclesfield[1] (he's on this list, comes to the meetups), Mutwin from Germany and Shai from Israel. The US team start to come online during the early afternoon so you'd be working with them too. We need to cover weekends, but Shai covers all Sundays at the moment so Saturdays are shared between the remaining people, currently that means you'd be working every third Saturday. You can take a day off in lieu, or not if you just want to get paid for another day. The Support Department ------------------------------------------------- A large part of Engine Yard is Support, it makes up probably about half of the company and has a nearly flat organisational structure. A lot of members are generalists, but people often specialise in certain areas, so for instance we have a guy who is really good with chef, and someone else who is working closely with the jRuby team to improve our jRuby support. We have (so far) twice-yearly meetups at Engine Yard HQ (This was the 1st meetup of 2010: http://www.flickr.com/photos/will_j/sets/72157623774987082/). Engine Yard will also pay for you to go to a conference every year[2] including flights, transfers hotel and conf entry), I usually go to RubyConf (http://www.flickr.com/photos/will_j/sets/72157622720249915/). More information ------------------------------------------------- Email: [email protected] will_jessop on skype if you want to voice or IM Jabber: [email protected] I'll be at the Manchester Digital Christmas party next month if you want to talk in person, but EY are looking to hire ASAP so that's cutting it close, I can probably meet up earlier in Manchester centre if needed. Applying ------------------------------------------------- Covering letter + CV to Shawn Hermann [email protected] (He's the support manager). Include a github profile if you've got one. If it goes further then at some point I might need to meet you in person. Probably in the centre of Manchester for a coffee or beer. Will. [1] We meet up to work in the centre of Manchester sometimes. [2] If you apply then talk this through when you negotiate, I have no idea what the deal is with new hires, I've been there for nearly 3 years, I think it's pretty much the same. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NWRUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nwrug-members?hl=en.
