Hey there! I’m Brandon Bayer, the founder and CEO of Flightcontrol. We are 4 person startup fresh out of Y Combinator that’s building something truly special. More than fundamentally changing the way most people deploy applications, we’re intentionally building the most life-giving and fulfilling company possible. My cofounder Mina and I care so deeply about building a company that helps people become the fullest version of who they are and helps them thrive personally and professionally.

Flightcontrol is solving the huge gap between Heroku and AWS

Today there is a big tradeoff between Heroku (and it’s derivatives) which is easy to use but very limiting and restricting, and AWS which gives you full power and control but is a nightmare to use. We solve this by providing a layer on top of a company’s own AWS account that makes it very easy to use while still letting them pop the hood and leverage the raw power of AWS directly.

The classic problem with things like Heroku is that you inevitably reach a point of scale at which you outgrow Heroku and have to undergo a time consuming and expensive migration to AWS directly. So our approach is to bring the Heroku style DX (or better!) to your own AWS account. With Heroku you have their custom layer of infrastructure between you and AWS. But with Flightcontrol, there is no custom infra — it’s just pure AWS and your services can scale as much as AWS can scale.

Our approach is to take the best AWS services (like Fargate and RDS), make them extremely simple and easy to use, and give you the very best in class setup possible. For example, we automatically configure Cloudfront in front of Fargate services. And since you own the infra, you can go into AWS to tweak and customize anything you need.

So far our customers are in love with the product, saying things like “you’ve nailed the simplicity without sacrificing control” and “this is probably the best way I’ve ever deployed my software”.

• Last fall we started building Flightcontrol, got accepted into the Y Combinator Winter 2022 batch, and raised a $1M preseed round.
• We launched the second week of January and now already have 19 paying customers live in production. Most of these are companies with brownfield apps that they’ve migrated from Heroku, Render, Vercel, or their own custom AWS setups, including kubernetes.
• In March, we grew from 11 to 19 paying customers and doubled the AWS resources we’re managing for customers.
• Here at the end of March, we just finished the Y Combinator batch and completed raising an additional $2.2M seed round.
• We have amazing investors, including Matt Biilmann (Netlify), Doron Sherman (VP of DevRel, Cloudinary), Randall Kent (Cypress.io), Zach Holman (#9 at Github), Nader Dabit (former AWS), Brian Douglas, Swizec, and Shawn Wang (swyx).

Meet Our Current Team of 4

• Brandon Bayer, Founder and CEO. Dayton, Ohio. You might know me as the creator of Blitz.js. Although highly technical, my strengths are product design and marketing. My superpower is simplicity. My top values that define everything I do are excellence, equality, inclusion, and freedom. Outside of work I love traveling, flying airplanes and helicopters, and rock climbing. My intention is to be the very best CEO and manager in the world. With a goal to build the best company to work for. I’m not here to be a boss. I’m here to support you and help make your dreams come true.
• Mina Abadir, Cofounder. Toronto, Canada. Mina is the technical genius that brings our core product features to life. He’s deeply authentic and caring, loves to laugh, and greatly enjoys a good video game. His superpower is empathy.
• Aleksandra Sikora, Lead Blitz Maintainer. Poland. She joined last fall as our first employee, mostly maintaining Blitz but has also been helping tremendously on Flightcontrol. She’s incredibly intelligent and talented, and loves traveling, hiking, and rock climbing. She brings so much joy and life to our team!
• Dillon Raphael, Senior Blitz Maintainer. Toronto, Canada. Dillon just joined the last week of March! He has such passion and drive to create amazing things in the world. And on top of that, he’s incredibly sincere and loyal. He brings so much passion and connection to our team!
• You?

We need an engineer with AWS devops/SRE experience to help us build our platform product

We need someone who is experienced with AWS. Ideally you have even more experience than Mina and will be able to bring tremendous value to both the design and implementation of features.

You will work alongside my cofounder Mina to develop our core platform functionality. You can see our public roadmap here. There are a ton of hard problems you’ll help us solve. Our core product boils down to a very sophisticated orchestration system that integrates with many different services, currently all in AWS but we’ll also be adding third-party integrations too.

Ideally you have both wide and deep AWS expertise. Or at a minimum wide with some deep experience and with ability to get deeper on anything that’s required. It’s a bonus if you already have any AWS certifications.

We use Typescript and Temporal to build all our AWS integrations. Temporal is an incredible technology that came out of Uber for managing complex backend workflows. It simplifies complexity in a similar way to how async/await simplifies promises and callbacks. We don’t expect you to know Temporal — we’ll help you get up to speed on it as much as you need.

For Flightcontrol features, we usually use a Cloudformation stack to create the initial service, but after that we use the AWS Typescript SDK to make direct API calls for updating and changing services.

To summarize, you should have:

• Knowledge with wide range of AWS services
• Ability to use multiple AWS services to build complex solutions
• Good working knowledge of security and networking best practices
• Experience with both server and serverless infrastructure
• Know your way through Docker
• Know Typescript or have the desire and ability to learn Typescript
• AWS certification is ++

What We Expect of You

• Bring as much of your personal self to work as you are comfortable with
• Do your very best work
• Have a life outside work, whether it’s hobbies, side projects, reading, etc. As long as you have something and work isn’t all you live for
• Complete honesty and integrity
• Be creative and innovative
• Be involved in our product planning, bringing your own ideas for what we should be doing and how we should be doing it.
• Help give our customers the very best experience possible. We all help with customer support.
• Be a leader. As one of our first employees, our future hires will look up to you and learn from you.
• Be human. We don’t expect you to be perfect. We all have a basement of bad experiences, insecurities, and anxieties. Our hope is that being part of our team is a huge beam of sunshine in your life that encourages and empowers you to overcome the challenges in the rest of your life.

This Job Is Not For You If

• You are not interested in growing professionally or personally
• You need or want someone to tell you exactly what to do
• You don’t want to bring any of your personal self to work. We’re actually totally ok with that, but the rest of us bring a lot of ourselves to work so that might be uncomfortable for you.
• You aren’t ok with with the company growing in team size, first slowly, but then increasing in speed over the next 1-2 years. When we enter that growth stage, you’ll have to learn to give away your Legos and work on bigger and more impactful things every so many months.

Salary & Benefits

• $145,000 USD salary
• Generous Equity via Stock Options, as employee #3 or #4
• Fully Remote
• Health Insurance Fully Paid For
• 32 Hour Work Week - More and more companies are finding that people accomplish the same amount of work in 32 hours as in 40 hours. Because it's nearly impossible to be fully productive at tech work for 8 hours every day. For most people, about 6 hours of focused work per day is the limit.
• Minimum 4 Weeks PTO - It's critical to have good work life balance, so you must take at least 4 weeks PTO each year.
• Unlimited Sick Leave - If you are feeling crappy, you aren't going to be doing your best work. So rest, get better, then come back energized.
• Menstrual Leave - There's no use trying to be productive when you are suffering. Take the day(s) off as PTO, no explanation needed.
• 2+ In-Person Company Gatherings Per Year
• Open Source - We are passionate about open-source and encourage you to contribute on company time to anything that will benefit the company
• Equipment - We'll make sure you have all the equipment you need to have an ergonomic, productive environment, including a standing desk and external monitors.
• Conferences - We're a big fan of in-person conference experiences, and encourage you to speak at and attend them. We'll fully pay for you to attend 2 conferences per year.
• Education - Budget for books or courses that are at least tangentially related to your work

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Who we are

Crowdcast is the online events platform for businesses, creators and people at large to bring their community together. Every month, millions of people attend events ranging from Q&As to workshops, live shows, meet-ups, webinars, online concerts, & online summits.

We’re a diverse community of kind, curious, deep-thinking, creative people guided by our principles in how we work together as a team, build our products, and engage with the community we serve.

We believe technology can be used to bring people together & bridge divides. We're empowering people to share their ideas at scale, bring their communities together, and make a living in the process.

Who you are

You get a kick out of imagining what's possible and then realizing it through code. You have a not-so-secret obsession with solving complex problems. You're aware that your job isn't over when that code gets deployed.

You have high integrity, are self-motivated, and a life-long learner. You're not afraid to dive into uncharted territory and are open to updating your opinions based on new information. You have strong written communication that is thoughtful and clear. You're constantly pushing yourself to grow and become the most authentic & full expression of yourself.

You've spent years refining your engineering skills and now you want to do work that truly makes a positive impact on the world. You're looking to help build a company that's directly empowering people while being profitable and sustainable. You balance creating impact today with long-term goals, and you want to play a key role in an early team. You're motivated to help build a team you love working with and a culture that you're proud to be part of.

What you'll do

• You won't be just another engineer at a giant company. We're a small tight-knit multidisciplinary team, and you'll be directly involved in shaping the product & culture.
• As a core member, you'll be integral in the architecture and development of the platform.
• You'll work with a supportive team to get things done with the right mix of quality and agility.
• We're pushing the boundaries of what's possible with live video using web technologies and have built some incredible tech that allows us to host interactive low-latency live video at scale. You'll be a core contributor, and you'll have the opportunity to experiment with innovative new solutions.
• You'll work with the latest technologies that power the web. On the back-end, you'll work with Node.js, Typescript, AWS, Docker & more. All of these are subject to change with time and your input.
• We value ownership and the ability to take an idea through all of the stages from conception to shipping a product. As an engineer at Crowdcast, you'll be highly independent and autonomous. There are no bosses.

Your skills & experience

• You've seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the just plain weird sides of the internet.
• 6+ years of engineering experience. Comfortable working across distributed systems. Have solid engineering fundamentals (CS degree a plus, but not required).
• Strong knowledge of the Node.js, Javascript and Typescript
• Strong experience with serverless technologies including AWS Lambda & AWS EventBridge
• Very proficient in server-side languages and a track record of running micro-services in production.
• Experience with relational databases (postgres) as well as document-based data stores (MongoDB, DynamoDB).
• You have multiple years of experience managing non-trivial software running in the cloud (AWS or others).
• Experience working with infrastructure-as-code tools such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, and others. You keep up with the ever-changing landscape of web application stacks and cloud platforms.
• You love to build resilient services that are reliable, scalable, and maintainable. You're obsessed with security and performance.
• You value creating and updating great documentation.
• Bonus: Experience with GraphQL.
• Bonus: You know your way around working Kubernetes, Docker, and other containerized services

Benefits & Perks

• We are fully remote
• Salary range is $100K-$140K + Equity
• Healthcare Coverage (including dental, vision, and life)
• Flexible hours – We're remote-first, you pick when you work
• Annual Retreats
• Paid Maternal/Paternal Leave
• Uncapped Vacation Policy – Take time off to take care of yourself
• Flexible PTO & Sick leave
• Investment in career growth and training
• Monthly Health and wellness stipend
• Work gear and home office setup stipend
• & more

We strongly encourage people from underrepresented communities to apply.

Crowdcast is an equal opportunity employer. We value and celebrate how you identify, who you love, the color of your skin, your age (at heart and on paper), the gods you do or don't believe in, and every other belief and characteristic that makes you uniquely YOU. The more inclusive we are, the better we'll be as a team—and the better we'll be able to create an inclusive product.

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