SB Nation Jobs

Operations Engineer

Vox Media is company driven by talent, technology, and design. We develop the highest quality content, conversations, and applications for an audience of over 22 million passionate people around the world.

After four years of steady growth, we're a well-funded company, supported by the same folks who invested in Facebook and Etsy, with business expertise and a successful business model to go with our editorial and technology foundation.

We got our start innovating in sports media, as the largest and fastest-growing network of fan-centric online sports communities. Last year, we moved into consumer technology news with The Verge. Next up is Vox Games. It is an exciting time to be at Vox Media. Come join us.

Vox Media is looking for an operations engineer

We don't want just any operations engineer and we know that you don't want just any operations job. We're both particular not just because we know that we can afford to be but because we understand that it is important to find the right fit. We take our company culture seriously and we want all of our employees' work to bring them happiness and fulfillment, and you should expect us to put you in a position where you can find happiness and fulfillment from your work.

Are you the right fit for us?

• You have experience working with a production Ruby on Rails stack at scale. You have made performance tweaks and optimizations at the system level, in your network hardware, in the database and in the application stack. DDoS attacks are part of the job you've come to accept.
• You have fully given your life over to configuration management tools—hopefully Chef. You have extended your CM system's functionality in some clever way. Maybe you've open-sourced your work.
• You have a healthy paranoia, you acknowledge your fears but will face them having full confidence in your own abilities and in the research and testing you've done ahead of time, and in your solid rollback plan.
• You hate the current state of monitoring tools, and want nothing more than to implement a modern replacement, possibly building upon existing tools such as Graphite.
• You acknowledge that many people do not have the same level of expertise in your field as you do, and you accept that as not a flaw but simply a difference. You are humble about your accomplishments—of which there will be many. You are even-keeled—not getting too high on the highs but also not getting too low on the lows.
• You perform well under pressure, coming up with clever improvisations while all around you alarms are sounding. But you are only truly happy when coming up with proper long-term solutions, deftly balancing elegance with practicality.
• You really love this stuff. You've tried Coffeescript, you've written a node.js app just to see how it works, you've played with mongodb and redis, and you have a library of virtual machines just in case.

Yeah, I'd say you are just what we're looking for.

Are we the right fit for you?

• We are building something great, and our leadership group recognizes that in order to build and operate a great platform, we need a great operations department. To that end, we are hiring the best people and giving them the best tools and a simple mandate: to make our platform as stable, secure and performant as can be, and to have fun doing it. #great #best
• We will provide leadership and direction but we will not micromanage; we trust you to perform, and your results will speak for themselves. We are honest and upfront with you and we will maintain an open line of communication, understanding that it goes both ways. You will not want for feedback.
• We don't believe in walls. Metaphorical walls, that is; our office is not in a pasture or anything. What that means is the classic problem of tossing work over a wall to let the next group deal with does not happen here. We are a highly collaborative team, and you can expect to work with team members from product, support, editorial and yes, management.
• We produce really cool content. When your friends and family read SB Nation, The Verge or Vox Games—and they should read all three every day—you can brag that you played a major role in its production and not even be lying! There is something to be said about loving not just your work, but the final product. That something is: Hellz yes.
• Sometimes we talk in memes. We are a distributed team using Campfire for most of our communication, which of course leads to abundant use of animated GIFs. Try to keep up.

We're pretty cool, right? Totally.

Okay, so introduce yourself already!

We're not interested in a job application; we want to get to know you. Yes, you should fill out the forms and send us your resume, but we want to see more than that! Demonstrate your awesomeness and have fun with it in the process.

And remember: the more we know about you up front, the more comfortable we will be when talking to you. That can only work in your favor.

We'll leave the rest to you!

One more thing!

This position is open to remote candidates, and we are open to relocating you to our Washington D.C. office. Seriously, it's really nice!

About working at Vox Media: This is a permanent, full-time position with benefits based in Washington, DC (though we'll consider outstanding remote candidates). We work in a converted townhouse in Dupont Circle, a historic neighborhood full of interesting architecture and great coffee shops and restaurants. You'll be joining a family of focused, hard-working, creative people who are passionate about creating for the web, building tools to foster online community, and doing work that's challenging and fun.

Learn more about our work environment and other opportunities.