Overview

We’re looking for a support programmer to work with us as we build a safer, faster, better Basecamp. As well as working on Basecamp and our other apps, you’ll be an important part of our work on Basecamp, the company. You’ll be joining our existing support programmer Jim and working as part of our Security, Infrastructure and Performance team in a fun and varied role that will allow you to develop personally and professionally.

We recognise the strength that comes from having diverse teams built from different backgrounds, experiences and identities, and the ongoing work that goes into building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best work of your career. That starts with regularly working no more than 40 hours a week, and hopefully getting 8+ hours sleep a night. Our benefits are designed to support a sustainable, healthy relationship with your work.

Currently our team works from 32 different cities, spread across 6 countries. You can work from anywhere in the world, but your normal working day should have 4 hours or more overlap with Central Time (CST).

About you

Do you have questions?
Do you like finding answers?
Does helping people make your heart sing?
Can you approach problems calmly and compassionately?
Do you think clearly, and can you express yourself in English and in code?

About the job

Here are some examples of the kind of work you’ll be doing. Every single day, you’ll get to work across teams to support three major areas:

Making our customers happy.

  • You’ll be helping our customers to perform tasks they can’t do easily in Basecamp itself. We refer to these as concierge-style requests. They often involve writing small snippets of Ruby and working in a console
  • You’ll make it easier for companies to trust us by answering security and compliance questions
  • Every day you’ll be supportingour wonderful support team, to help them to ask better questions and find better answers for our customers
  • Developers who are working with our APIs sometimes need some help too, and you’ll be on hand to offer the right documentation, and suggestions on the best way to approach things

Working on our legacy

In the pursuit of answers, you’ll go delving into the codebase for all of our apps (including the very first Rails app!) to discover how things work. You’ll be comfortable looking at code, exceptions and logs, identifying problems and suggesting fixes.

Experience with Ruby, Rails and JavaScript would be very helpful, but if you have been using different languages and stacks, that’s fine too. Be sure to tell us all about it in your application.

As well as spelunking through our apps, you’ll work with people across Basecamp every day:

  • Delving into the codebase for all of our apps (including the first Rails app!) to discover how things work
  • Working with our ops team to track down mail delivery issues, or networking problems or SSL certificate fun
  • Working with programmers to triage bugs, suggest fixes, and write code
  • Exploring issues with our Android or iOS apps, and working with our mobile teams
  • Support our QA team as they lead our feature retrospectives

Helping us find ways to be better

  • Triaging security reports & identifying fixes
  • Looking at reports of slowness in our apps and searching for the cause
  • Researching & planning improvements across teams, like ending support for RC4, or taking part in PrivacyShield certification
  • Looking at exceptions in our apps, and identifying fixes
  • Providing thoughtful commentary on product pitches, ideas and suggested fixes based on what you have seen
  • Investigating common cases, and coming up with ideas on how to reduce them

You’ll get support and trust every step of the way, and the freedom to make decisions to make things simpler, clearer, easier and more honest.

What happens after you apply

We’re accepting applications until February 3rd, 2017. We’ll take a look at your cover letter, and your writing samples, and if we like what we see, we’ll be in touch to arrange a chat. We’re hoping you’ll be ready to start with us around March 20th 2017.

About Basecamp

Basecamp was founded in 1999. We started out with four people, and today we’re a company of about 50 spread out across 32 different cities around the world. Our headquarters is in Chicago, but everyone at Basecamp is free to live and work wherever they want. Many of us love working remotely – we literally wrote the book on remote working!

We’re designers, programmers, tinkerers, writers, speakers, bikers, engineers, runners, developers, chefs, analysts, campers, musicians, filmmakers, knitters, hikers, authors, photographers, pilots, race car drivers, readers, travelers, gardeners, volunteers, parents, and hard workers.

2016 marks our 17th year in business, yet we feel like we’re just getting started. For our first 15 years we were called 37signals. We changed our name to Basecamp in 2014 to reflect our focus on our most popular product (coincidently named Basecamp).

Over the years we’ve been fortunate to earn the repeat business of thousands of customers including some of the world’s largest - and smallest - companies. It’s rare that a business tool is equally popular with the big guys and the small guys, but Basecamp is that kind of tool. Freelancers, small shops, mid-sized companies, and multinationals all rely on Basecamp.

If you run in tech circles, you’ve surely heard of Ruby on Rails. Over the past decade, Rails has become one of the world’s most popular programming frameworks. Sites like Twitter, and GitHub, and Shopify, and hundreds of thousands more all run on Rails.

The first Rails app, however, was our very own Basecamp. Rails was invented in 2003 by David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner here at Basecamp. Today Rails is as vibrant as ever, and still at the heart of Basecamp. Many of Rails modern innovations start as experiments inside Basecamp.

Treating people right is fundamental to how we do business. We treat our customers as we’d want to be treated, we treat each other like family, and we treat ourselves to a good day’s work and a good night’s sleep.

Our goals have always been the same: Have fun, do exceptional work, build the best product in the business, experiment, pay attention to the details, treat people right, tell the truth, have a positive impact on the world around us, give back, and keep learning.

We’re also big believers in business 101. We don’t spend more than we earn, we don’t waste money on things that don’t matter, we don’t give away everything for free and hope we’ll figure it out before we run out of cash. We’re in business to stay in business, and we have 15 profitable years in a row to back it up.