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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Salary and compensation

$140,000 — $150,000/year

Benefits

⏰ Async

Location

Americas/Europe/Africa Timezones