Giant Swarm is a fast-growing open-source infrastructure management platform used by modern enterprises. Our vision is to empower developers around the world to ship great products.

We're a distributed, diverse, and growing team, spread across Europe. The company is based in Cologne, Germany, where we have a small office in a coworking space. However, less than 5% of us actually work there. All workflows are designed to function remotely - but of course, if you want to visit Cologne, you are more than welcome!

What we offer on top:

• Choose the hardware you like the most!
• Family first - we have more kids than employees!
• Join our team at conferences all over the globe!
• Internal Hackathons - we love to challenge ourselves!
• 2 Off-Sites per year (check our photos on Instagram)!

What’s the most outstanding part about working for Giant Swarm?
"It's a long list, but for me, the most important thing is the people. It's great to be surrounded by so many smart people - there's a lot of work to do but it doesn't feel like an uphill struggle because everyone pulls their weight so well"
(Simon Weald, SRE)

While we are remote-first, we appreciate quality time with our co-workers, so we meet in person twice a year to work and have fun together.

Work-life integration

• Flexible working hours, and working from home or anywhere you prefer
• Currently, the number of kids from our team members outnumbers the number of employees.
• We don’t only care about the kids “within” the company, but also about all children - for example, we compensate the carbon of all our flights.
• As an international company, we want to create similar standards for everyone, regardless of location. So, additional perks (for example, a location-aware, fixed amount paid each month to cover costs like co-working, phone contracts or gym memberships), paid parental leave and healthcare compensation are compulsory.

Your Job

• You maintain, operate and upgrade our own and our customer’s Kubernetes clusters.
• You will design, configure, build, and maintain our core infrastructure, from kernel parameters to the cloud provider templates.
• You understand how servers and systems work and you tweak their behavior to your needs.
• You will be responsible for our monitoring, logging and alerting.
• You will help resolve incidents on our own and our customer’s clusters.
• You participate in the on-call support schedule (~ one 24 hours shift every 2 weeks)
• You are a go-to person in case our developers need advice regarding infrastructure.
• You will automate all the things.

Requirements

• You must have deep, hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes from both the end-user and the operation side.
• You have wide experience with and are able to debug Networking, Security, Linux (Kernel, Namespaces, cgroups).
• You have great debugging skills and you are not afraid to deep dive into thousands of lines of logs.
• You have decent coding skills, preferably in Go. You have experience with maintaining infrastructure with code.
• You know the good and bad parts of various automatization tools (Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Ansible or Saltstack).
• You are fluent with CNCF products running on top of Kubernetes (prometheus, grafana, ingress controller, …) you know how to use them and how to configure them.
• You have a decent knowledge of storage including software-defined storage.
• You like reverse and performance engineering.
• You automate all the things by writing code. Using bash scripts for it makes you sad :)
• We are currently mostly distributed around Europe (around UTC), but we have recently won our first US client and are looking for someone in the same time zone. Thus, you are located somewhere at the American (North, South or Central) East Coast.

Why we think this job is worth applying for!

Impact, Impact, Impact! We are a remote-first organization with a growing team from 15+ European countries. Every new team member changes the team. This is great! People who know things we don’t are highly welcome.

“It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission” (Grace Hopper) - sure, it’s not 100% like this, but we have a strong culture of failure which, is part of our agile mindset. We don’t do things like in the guidebook. You can try things out! Our default to 100% transparency will help you here.
We play a key role in our customers' digital transformation. We have partnered up with Amazon and Microsoft to provide our solution on their cloud platforms - more will follow.
We have been in this ecosystem from the get-go and as part of the CNCF family, we feel at home in the community. As a part of Giant Swarm, you will also join this extended family.
We serve some of Europe's leading organizations and are talking to many more.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?"Finding time to concentrate on a specific task (especially if it's in-depth) - SREs context-switch a lot"
(Simon Weald, SRE)

Interested? Questions? Coffee? Contact Mirco (mirco@giantswarm.io) or apply directly!

We are looking for a Kubernetes Solution Engineer on the US East Coast

Giant Swarm is a fast-growing open-source infrastructure management platform used by modern enterprises. Our vision is to empower developers around the world to ship great products.

You are the voice of our existing and prospective US customers inside Giant Swarm and the voice of Giant Swarm towards these customers, helping both sides to be successful.

We're a distributed, diverse, and growing team spread across Europe, with a small office in our headquarters in Cologne, Germany. With under 5% of the company working there, all workflows are created to function remotely - but of course, if you want to visit Cologne, you are more than welcome! You will also find someone in 15 other countries though.

While we are remote-first, we appreciate quality time with our co-workers, so we meet in person twice a year to work and have fun together.

Work-life integration

• Flexible working hours, and working from home or anywhere you prefer but please note that your permanent location should be somewhere on the US East Coast.
• Currently, the number of kids from our team members outnumbers the number of employees.
• We don’t only care about the kids “within” the company, but also about all children - for example, we compensate the carbon of all our flights.
• As an international company, we want to create similar standards for everyone, regardless of location. So, additional perks (for example, a location-aware, fixed amount paid each month to cover costs like co-working, phone contracts or gym memberships), paid parental leave and healthcare compensation are compulsory.

Your Job:

• We have recently won our first US-based client and are planning on expanding this area further.
• Together with our first US based Platform Engineer, you’ll be spearheading our future US team
• You’ll be working closely with our cross-functional teams based in Europe
• In close cooperation with our US customers you’ll understand their architecture and further their understanding of Giant Swarm, helping them to get the most out of our product and the CNCF landscape, master Cloud Native tools like Kubernetes, Prometheus as well as Loki, Helm and others
• Our solution engineers are becoming part of diverse open source communities around tools that our customers need and use, contributing back to those projects where possible. You build and maintain helm charts that might start out as a special project for one customer and end up being a managed service run by all our customers
• You hold trainings and workshops at conferences, for our existing customers, as well as with Giant Swarm’s potential customers. Do note that the role requires minimum travel as most of our interactions as a fully remote company are via video conferencing
• Learn from customer's problems with moving to microservices architectures, get your hands dirty and find out what Cloud Native project's entrails look like. The more successful our customers are with the Cloud Native journey, the more successful we are
• Ultimately, you are also responsible for documentation, helping the product teams implement fixes, prioritizing features and making sure we only need to answer questions once
• First impressions are important! You help create a great onboarding experience for our customers and become the main point of contact for them
• To sum it up: Customer Success is all that matters. Within the solution engineering team, we make sure our customers are happy and taking the right steps going forward, at best you anticipate the problems they might face in the future

Requirements:

• You have experience with more than one programming language, including Go, and a strong architectural background.
• You feel at home in the Kubernetes world, especially the multitude of Open Source tools around Kubernetes and the Container World.
• You can explain complicated things concisely and easily for a diverse audience.
• You have a strong sense in providing an awesome customer service that makes life easier for Developers. Your communication skills (especially written form) are excellent. Very good English skills are a must-have. German skills are a bonus.
• You are open to attend conferences with our team and hold talks in front of customers. You are happy to travel 5-10% per year
• You are based on the US East Coast

Why we think this job is worth applying for (challenge us!)

Impact, Impact, Impact! We are a remote-first organization with a growing team from 15+ European countries. Every new team member changes the team. This is great! People who know things we don’t are highly welcome.

“It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission” (Grace Hopper) - sure, it’s not 100% like this, but we have a strong culture of failure which, is part of our agile mindset. We don’t do things like in the guidebook. You can try things out! Our default to 100% transparency will help you here.

We play a key role in our customers' digital transformation. We have partnered up with Amazon and Microsoft to provide our solution on their cloud platforms - more will follow.

We have been in this ecosystem from the get-go and as part of the CNCF family, we feel at home in the community. As a part of Giant Swarm, you will also join this extended family.

We serve some of Europe's leading organizations and are talking to many more.

WHY Giant Swarm?

We like to give you a glimpse on how working with is like:

Self-organization

Creative work needs freedom and openness. We encourage you to do your work wherever and whenever you want. We expect passion and encourage sustainability. If you need rest, take it. We don't count holidays - but we are also aware that this combined with remote work can also lead to working too much. So we encourage you to take holidays and help you to manage the freedom and flexibility.

Teamwork

We are a growing company with team members distributed all over Europe and plans on expanding to the US. Our ambitious goals are only achievable as a team. Everybody’s input is highly welcome and appreciated. Although sometimes rules and processes are necessary, we try to keep them as lean as possible. Always question the status quo and find new ways of collaboration and teamwork.

Learning

Learning is mandatory and fun at the same time. If you realize you want to expand your knowledge in a specific area, we support you with conferences, books etc.

Basics

We offer fair (transparent and open) salaries with benefits like choosing your own laptop, additional perks (for example, a location-aware, fixed amount paid each month to cover costs like co-working, phone contracts or gym memberships), paid parental leave and healthcare compensation are compulsory. And you will participate in our stock options program. Currently, our team members have more children than we are employees. So family-friendliness is a must.

We are not hiring job descriptions. We hire humans. :) We welcome applications from everybody, regardless ethnic or national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or age.

Interested? Questions? Contact Larissa or apply directly.

We are looking for a Platform Engineer for Containers

Your Job:

• You will be responsible for architecting and building distributed systems
• You will use a wide variety of open source technologies and tools
• You take part for testing, metrics, continuous integration

Requirements:

• You have experience with more than one language and a strong architectural background. One of these languages is Go.
• You love to automate things and you are used to deploy in production multiple times a day
• You are a profound Linux user
• You have hands-on experience with kubernetes, prometheus and docker are a bonus point
• You prefer to build your applications as multiple services instead of a monolith
• You know the concepts of CAP theorem, paxos/raft concensus, distributed databases and message passing
• We (and our customers) are currently mostly distributed around Europe (around UTC), thus, your main timezone needs to be between -2UTC to +2UTC to ensure better communication.

Why we think this position is worth applying for (challenge us!)

• Impact, Impact, Impact! We are a remote-first organization with a growing team from 15+ European countries. Every new team member changes the team. This is great! People who know things we don’t are highly welcomed.
• “It's better to ask forgiveness than permission” (Paolini) - sure, it’s not 100% like this, but we have a strong culture of failure which is part of our agile mindset. We don’t do things like in the guidebook. You can try things out!
• We play a key role in our customer's digital transformation. We have partnered up with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to provide our solution on their cloud platforms - more will follow.
• We serve some of Europe's leading organizations and are talking to many more.

Your Job

• You are part of our People Ops Team, (currently 3 people) working on enabling our growth through feedback processes, onboarding, our transparent salaries, team structures, and other tasks beyond hiring new colleagues.
• You will be our direct contact person for all employees regarding their individual development. As we believe that no two people are the same and that there is no “one fits all” solution, “individual” is the keyword here.
• You’ll work closely with the MoCs (Master of Ceremonies) of our teams and help them on their road to continuous improvement. You are the people person for those teams when it comes to moderation of retros as well as a sparring partner for people issues. We encourage self-organization a lot, but if there is a need for your support, you are there.
• You foster our self-organization throughout the company, enabling individuals and teams to make their own decisions with confidence, allowing the company to remain a group of individuals walking in the same direction. Nobody is left behind. You ensure this structure is under constant review and communicated in a way that makes it understandable for all involved.
• You will work with diverse parties of the organization on topics such as team development, self-organisation, individual growth, responsibilities and accountability. We strongly believe in agility and want to continue being at the forefront of the new work era. All your initiatives need to fit in our remote and agile context.
• To learn more about how we work, you can check out the Inside Giant Swarm Blog Posts: https://blog.giantswarm.io/inside/

Requirements

• You have at least 5+ years experience in working in People Operations (or in an agile consulting company) and you’ll survive the fact that we really like iterating. We will never have a final plan, knowing that things that work today won't work tomorrow. Uncertainty is your motivator.
• You can give proposals, and defend them when challenged, in a very self-organized environment where obviously everyone has an opinion about people topics as it affects us all.
• You have been working in a startup environment and having worked remotely already is a plus as this will help you understand the challenges that come with working in this way, as few companies are currently organised this way
• You’re happy to hop between individual (people) and organisation levels. In the beginning, it will be more organizational work.
• You have a strong interest and at best you already have experience in agile methodologies. It would be great if you have already worked with software teams. Our purpose is to create similar structures in the entire company, so if you have experience there - great!
• Being a certified coach and or scrum master is a big plus
• You are happy with English as our company language

 Why we think this job is worth applying (challenge us!)

• Impact, Impact, Impact! We are a remote-first organization with a growing team (from 15+ European countries) Every new team member changes the team. This is great! People who know things we don’t are highly welcome.
• “It's better to ask forgiveness than permission” (Paolini) - sure, it’s not 100% like this, but we have a strong culture of failure which, is part of our agile mindset. We don’t do things by the guidebook. You can try things out! Our default to 100% transparency will help you here.
• Appreciation and trust are the columns for our People Operations work. We try not to use “new work” as a buzzword, we try to live it. Larissa, Mirco and Anna (your future colleagues can talk for hours about that ;))

WHY Giant Swarm?

We can give you a glimpse on how working with us will be like:

Self-organization

Creative work needs freedom and openness. We encourage you to do your work wherever and whenever you want. We expect passion and encourage sustainability. If you need rest, take it. We don't count holidays - we count outcome.

Teamwork

We are a growing company with 50+ team members distributed all over Europe and plans on expanding to the US. Our ambitious goals are only achievable as a team. Everybody’s input is highly welcome and appreciated. Although sometimes rules and processes are necessary, we try to keep them as lean as possible. Always question the status quo and find new ways of collaboration and team-work.

Learning

Learning is mandatory and fun at the same time. If you realize you want to expand your knowledge in a specific area, we support you with conferences, books etc.

Basics

We offer fair (transparent and open) salaries with benefits like choosing your own laptop, additional perks (for example, a location-aware, fixed amount paid each month to cover costs like co-working, phone contracts or gym memberships), paid parental leave and healthcare compensation are compulsory. And you will participate in our stock options program. Currently, our team members have more children than we are employees. So family-friendliness is a must.

We are not hiring job descriptions. We hire humans. :)

We welcome applications from everybody, regardless of ethnic or national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or age.

Interested? Questions? Coffee? Contact Larissa or apply directly