Developer Advocate at Calm, Ambitious DevTools Startup Full Time

Flightcontrol is a 5 person devtool startup cofounded by the creator of Blitz.js. We’re not the macho, overworked team that “startup” might bring to mind. We’re intentionally building the most life-giving and fulfilling company possible, and we want you to join us! 🙂

Flightcontrol is transforming the app deployment landscape

Flightcontrol provides the deployment experience of a Platform-as-a-Service but without the limitations.

Traditionally, users had to choose between a PaaS like Heroku, which is easy to use but is a closed-box with limitations and restrictions, or AWS which gives you full power and control but is a royal pain to set up. But with Flightcontrol they get the best of both worlds: great developer experience and full control and scalability

Our product is so compelling that most of our users are migrating existing applications from Heroku, Render, Railway, Vercel and from custom AWS setups.

Before you cringe at our current design, know that we are currently working with Overnice to completely overhaul our brand design, marketing site, and UI/UX. So rest assured, you’ll soon have world-class brand materials to work with 🙂

• Since launching in January, over 260 users have deployed 20,000+ times
• Users of all sizes love the product, from solo indie hackers to enterprises
• We went through Y Combinator in W22 and have raised $3.5M.
   

Meet Our Team of 5

1. Brandon Bayer, Cofounder 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 build the best company to work for in the world. I’m here to support you and help make your dreams come true.
2. Mina Abadir, Cofounder and CTO. 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.
3. Dillon Raphael, Senior Software Engineer and Lead Blitz Maintainer. Toronto, Canada. He joined at the end of March and has such passion and drive to create amazing things in the world. He’s incredibly sincere and loyal, and loves boxing. He’s always looking out for other people.
4. Blake Bayer, Junior Software Engineer. Dayton, Ohio. Formerly a nurse, Blake joined at the end of April. This is his first job in tech, and he continually impresses everyone on the team with his ability to learn and implement complex things quickly. He loves rock climbing and learning new things.
5. Camila Rondinini, Senior Backend Software Engineer. Spain. Since joining this past June, she is already an extremely foundational part of our team, having designed and shipped some of our most important features. She’s an incredible engineer and has made a significant impact on our engineering culture.
6. You? 😉
    

We need you to help us grow through awareness & education

As our first devrel hire, this is your chance to really shine and help propel Flightcontrol into one of the most loved developer companies of this decade. This is a critical role in shaping Flightcontrol

Your high level goal is to grow “top of funnel” traffic through awareness and education, with written content as the foundation.

We are building a product-led growth flywheel. Your primary role is feeding the flywheel via new top of funnel users. Your secondary role is improving the flywheel through education and documentation.

So far Brandon has been doing all the devrel related tasks. You’ll work closely with him to figure out where and how to invest your efforts. We don’t yet have the perfect content strategy. So we’ll be experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t.

In time, we want to be known as the cloud education company. The place where all devs turn to become maestros of the cloud. We believe that most engineers would love working with native cloud providers like AWS if only it was more approachable and more easily understood. Our vision is to empower an entirely new generation of engineers through our product and through our educational content.

Responsibilities

• Deeply understand our product, its strengths and weaknesses
• Create and distribute compelling technical content, including blog posts, documentation, guides, demos, and videosWe care about quality over quantity
  Identify and work on collaborations and integrations with other companies and projectsExample: how to use Flightcontrol preview environments to run isolated Cypress e2e tests
• Represent Flightcontrol at eventsIdentifying relevant events for Flightcontrol and organizing our participation (meetups, conferences, hackathons, workshops, etc.),
  • Participating in 4-8 of these events per year, as a speaker or sponsor
• Be able to function as an extension of our engineering team. You won’t routinely be assigned product tickets, but we want you to keep your engineering chops and be able to help fix DX issues or help implement third party integrations. Our stack is Typescript, Next.js, React.
• Help with customer success. As a small team, we all share this responsibility. Helping with this is one of the best ways to understand nitty-gritty details of our product, product improvement ideas, and documentation ideas.A customer recently said that we “have amazing support and developer success” and that it provides a tremendous amount of value to them

Requirements

• 3 years full-time experience as a software engineer and are comfortable with fullstack
• Experience deploying and maintaining production applications
• Working knowledge of some basic AWS services like EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda
• Teacher — can explain complex things in as simple a manner as possible
• Writer — great at writing technical content, ideally for 1+ years
• Grit — can ship content consistently over time through thick and thin
• Empathy — can learn and understand what’s important to developers and engineering organizations
• Credible — produces content that acknowledges the trade-offs and complexities of the real world
• Can overlap with 10a-noon US Eastern time (EST) . You can work from anywhere in the world, but we have our company wide meetings in the 10a-12p EST time range.

Nice to have

• Great at creating videos
• Devrel experience
• Devops experience
• Conference speaking experience
• Great knowledge of the application hosting/deployment ecosystem
• Able to work with basic demos in several programming languages
   

You Are Someone Who

• Is Kind. We are a team that seeks to work really well together by building deep relationships. We have each other’s backs. We care about and check in on each other, and we enjoy being together. We have company retreats 2-3 times per year for a week at a time.
• Is Collaborative. We all work closely together to design and develop the best product possible. We want someone who is humble but will bring your own ideas on how to be more excellent.
• Takes Ownership. We offer significant equity because we want you to think at a higher level than just your daily tasks. We want you to help us shape the business. We need someone who loves to dig in and do what it takes to figure things out. And we want someone who is good at turning vague ideas into magnificence.
• Has a Growth Mindset. It matters more where you are going than where you are today. We’re looking for someone who loves to grow, improve, and learn new things.
   

Your Typical Week at Flightcontrol

On Monday, depending on your timezone, you’ll start your morning or afternoon with a coffee chat where everyone is together for causal conversation. After that, you’ll join our Flightcontrol planning session with the entire Flightcontrol product team.

Tuesday is usually meeting free, so you’ll be focused on your work.

On Wednesday you’ll have your weekly 1 on 1 with Brandon, the CEO. This is your time to ask for what you want, bring up issues, ask hard questions, and give and receive feedback. Brandon takes feedback very seriously and is quick to make needed changes.

Thursday and Friday are your time for deep work.

Aside from being available 9a-12p EST, your work hours are flexible and up to you. Some of us work a standard 9-5 type of deal while others have varying schedules.

You’ll collaborate with Brandon as much as is needed.

Since we’re a startup, the journey from idea to building to shipping to growing is certainly a bit of a roller coaster. But we’re all on the roller coaster together, learning and iterating as quickly as we can. As long as we stick to our values and show up for each other with curiosity, compassion, and collaboration, we can likely overcome just about anything together.

Every month we have a tech-debt cleanup day. Every other month we have a company hackathon.

You Can Grow With Us

We want you to grow with us as much as you desire. As we scale, you’ll be able to grow into almost any role you can imagine. Want to become a team lead? We’ll help train you. Want to become a manager? We’ll make it happen. Want to be an executive? Let’s figure that out. We want you to be with us as long as you are extremely happy. If we get to place were you aren’t happy, we’ll do everything we can to help you find a place where you are.

Our Code of Excellence

• Go above and beyond. We’re not here to half-way do anything. If we’re going to do something, we’re going to do a stellar job.
• Tell the truth even when it hurts. We don’t tell white lies, and we don’t deceive. Even when it costs.
• Take care of you and yours first, work second. Nothing matters more than family and close relationships. We never sacrifice them for work.
• Treat people better than they deserve. Kindness and generosity guides how we treat everyone, including teammates and customers.
• Give and receive feedback. Feedback is essential for growth. We highly value giving and receiving informal, constructive feedback between all members of the team, and then taking prompt action on that feedback.
• Have a life outside work. It can be anything, hobbies, side projects, reading, etc. As long as you have something and work isn’t all you live for.
• Eradicate stress. Stress is a killer, and we work to eliminate it through any means, including systems, exercise, and meditation.
• Nothing is impossible. We believe we can create any future we imagine, and we lean into solving the things that seem impossible.
• Build a legacy. We are here to do our very best work. Work that will inspire generations for years to come.
   

Salary & Benefits

• Salary: $110k — $145k USD (same as our engineering roles)
  0.75% — 1% Equity Stock Options. You’ll be a 20+ millionaire if our growth continues like we think it will
• 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.
• Minimum 4 Weeks PTO – It’s critical to have good work life balance, so you must take at least 4 weeks PTO each year.
• 401k – We’re still working out the details on this, but will get it nailed down asap if it’s important to you
• Menstrual Leave – There’s no use trying to be productive when you are suffering. Take the day(s) off as PTO, no explanation needed.
• 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.
• 2+ In-Person Company Retreats Per Year (our next one is in Thailand in Feb)
• 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.
   

Our process:

1. You submit the application
2. Second round of written question & answers
3. 30 minute zoom with Brandon, CEO
4. 30 minute zoom with a Flightcontrol employee — get to know each other, opportunity for you to ask questions
5. 1 hour technical interview with Mina, CTO
   1. No LeetCode garbage — we’ll offer you a range of options so you can choose a style that you’ll do best at
6. 1 hour zoom with Brandon, CEO — a deep dive on your experience, devrel strategy, tactics, and information architecture
7. Another short call with Brandon for both of us to ask and answer questions in preparation for making an offer

Tagged as: AWS, writing