Overview

At Wistia we believe that every person in every business will use video to communicate every day, for asynchronous as well as live communication. It will feel as fluid and natural as it does to text or call someone today, but even more personal and human .

This reality is still a way off, but we’re super excited to start building it now through simple and delightful video-focused products.

To help us get there, we’re looking for a Software Engineer of Infrastructure who is excited to help our engineering teams solve challenging problems.

As an infrastructure software engineer at Wistia, you can expect to lead projects such as the following.

  • Improve our in-house deployment platform by having it expose access to new Kubernetes options or more effectively use Kubernetes primitives, or finding ways to make our Jenkins-based CI system more pleasant to use for other engineers
  • Gather feedback from colleagues to identify workflow frictions or architectural problems across our codebases and advise and assist with improvements, such as by measuring the current load of different pieces of a system, identifying problem libraries or other system components and suggesting a solution or vetting a replacement, or planning out the steps of a complex refactoring across services.
  • Make a manual infrastructure operation more automatic or declarative, e.g. by building a tool to sync our DNS zones from a source-controlled config file or by writing a bot to show us output in new infrastructure pull requests
  • Advise our application development teams on how best to architect a new feature, including evaluating a datastore for a particular new workload, designing data flows to keep app containers stateless, deciding how to best employ AWS primitives, and identifying and avoiding single points of failure
  • Improve observability across our Rails and Elixir codebases and Linux hosts via logging and instrumentation, identify performance bottlenecks across systems, and recommend configuration or application design improvements to handle growing system scale
  • Update our Chef recipes to be compatible with new software versions or to apply security patches, bake the updates into new VM images, and roll out new images to all our clusters

We are looking for someone who is excited to support our engineering colleagues on other teams and flexible enough to work at any level of our stack. We won’t expect you to know all the tools we use on your first day, as long as you’re eager to learn and you thrive working collaboratively. We’re a small team, so we will also value experiences and skillsets that complement our existing strengths.

Here are some qualities we look for in Wistia engineers, and why we feel they’re so important:

  • Learn continuously. We’re constantly faced with the unknown at Wistia. We won’t expect you to have an answer ready for every question, but we value the ability to quickly learn new technologies as you go.
  • Collaborate often. Whether through pair programming, a whiteboard session, or a casual lunch conversation, collaboration helps the best ideas and practices to proliferate.
  • Communicate effectively. Our work routinely affects our customers, their viewers, and other Wistians. Whether gathering feedback on a design proposal, updating colleagues on a project’s progress, pairing on a tough problem, or writing documentation, it is critical our communication be clear and concise to reach a shared vision.
  • Show empathy for colleagues. We value our colleagues more than our code. Being respectful, leaving space for others, and trying to understand someone else’s perspective instead of just defending your own are all critical to maintaining a team where everyone can feel included and empowered to do their best work.
  • Write clean and understandable code. We write code for each other and for our future selves. Code that is clear and tested sets us up for speed, reliability, and a more enjoyable development experience.
  • Navigate complex trade-offs. Most hard decisions involve trade-offs. Do we want our distributed database to be more consistent, or more available? Should we use a hosted product that will save us time now, but force us to move to a new system in a year? These are regular conversations!
  • Think for yourself. We hire people because we value their unique thoughts, insights and experiences. These things matter a great deal more to us than conventional wisdom or herd mentalities in technical communities.
  • Strive for simplicity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.” Making things simple and elegant is deceptively difficult, but it’s worth the effort because the result is easier to understand and work with.

We’re profitable, growing, and independent of venture funding, so we have the luxury of being able to invest in whatever will best serve the long-term value of the company. We know the biggest investment we can make is in our employees, so we provide:

  • A competitive salary
  • 401k with 3% company contribution, regardless of whether you make contributions
  • Flexible hours
  • Fully paid healthcare, dental and vision coverage for you and your family and a healthcare FSA
  • Up to 12 weeks paid family leave
  • Untracked vacation and sick leave (most employees take about four weeks of vacation)
  • Transportation subsidies
  • Financial support for continuing education, professional development and sponsorship for conferences
  • A convenient office just south of Central Square in Cambridge, MA. We’re right on the Red Line, surrounded by great restaurants, parks, and even a dog park.

We are working hard to make Wistia an inclusive and diverse place where everyone feels happy, fulfilled, respected, comfortable, and welcome. We want you to have fun here! Come join us and let’s build really cool things together.

This role is open to local candidates based out of our Cambridge, MA office or remote candidates authorized to work in the US. Remote candidates must have prior experience working successfully on a distributed team, as the role is for a fully distributed team within our mixed remote & in-office Engineering department.

If you would like to apply, please link or upload any resources that will help us understand your background and your strengths.