Support engineer (remote)

First off, we have published some thoughts about work over at /jobs/ and /about/. These explain some of the choices we make and could help you figure out if we are a match culturally.

If you don't know Transloadit yet, here is some information about our company.

Transloadit

Transloadit is a file uploading and encoding service. Launched by three developers who met through open source in 2009, customers have been loving our API and top-notch support ever since.

We were the first to run Node.js in production. As such we have had to invent a few wheels, which we subsequently shared with the world. Most notably: node-mysql, node-formidable and node-retry. These are modules that are now industry standards for dealing with MySQL, file uploads and networked/unreliable systems. We have also contributed a lot to Node.js itself, and employ a member of its Technical Steering Committee.

Roughly 80% of our revenue is allocated towards open source. Besides the aforementioned Node.js contributions, we started Tus and Uppy – two ambitious projects that are both #1 in their respective category and are changing how people share files on the internet. We collaborate on these projects with engineers from Apple, Google, Vimeo, and Cloudflare.

Our commercial service is what keeps all of these efforts afloat: a REST API that developers can integrate with to make light work of bulk importing, encoding, resizing, recognizing, rotating, or file thumbnailing – all fully automated.

Running this service requires writing Node.js software that accepts uploads and queues encoding jobs. It involves sandboxing open source tools that we run on those files, running multiple versions of those tools simultaneously using Nix, analyzing incoming traffic and scaling up AWS machines ahead of time (between 200-1000 heavy machines). We iterate and improve each of these things daily and take extreme care not to break existing integraitons and staying backwards compatible.

Like with mobile data plans, customers sign up for a monthly plan that includes a certain amount of gigabytes to be processed by us. There are overage fees if they surpass this amount. We are largely self-service: developers find us on Google or through one of our open source projects, sign up, read the documentation, experiment, and integrate themselves.

The Job

Sometimes, our paying customers require further assistance, whether because of a specific edge case, a bug, missing some documentation, or because they have feature requests. That's when they reach out to us via:

• Twitter
• GitHub
• StackOverflow
• our Community Forum
• Slack (a handful of enterprises pay for this option)
• But 90% will come in via: Intercom (a private, web-based support service)

We're looking for someone to attend to these requests for help, and we hope that someone is you! Ideally, you are technically savvy and have some developer experience, but you don't necessarily see yourself programming all day, every day. You find it rewarding to talk to other human beings, and help them figure out and resolve any problems they encounter while integrating with our API. You take pride in doing these things well, you have patience and empathy, you don't cut corners, and you value quality over quantity.

The job is called Support Engineer, but you'll be meandering into other areas as well.

As it happens, at Transloadit, we don't necessarily believe tha three areas of our operation are so different – support, content writing, and customer acquisition go very much hand in hand. To give an example: if you find yourself giving the same answer on numerous occasions, you could generalize the issue and turn it into a walkthrough blog post. Such an article may, in turn, attract new developers who may, after you answer a few of their questions, end up signing up for our service.

We find this cross-pollination is very powerful and blending these roles also keeps your job fresh. For Transloadit, customer support becomes one of the best avenues for inbound sales that we could hope for. So, when the support inbox is empty and you have a few hours, follow up on that recent conversation to see if they are happy, or spend some time improving our docs, adding to our FAQ-turning recent answers into new content so that current and future customers may benefit from it. Next time that same question comes in you can just refer them to the URL.

Prerequisites

• Excellent proficiency in written English, as most of our customers are US-based and you would be encouraged to write/update content
• High proficiency in verbal English, as our weekly meetings are held in English and you will be expected to do the occasional call with a customer (a few a year would be much)
• ±4h worktime overlap with CE(S)T office hours is required. Especially early on, having most of the team awake when you work will help you get into the groove
• Up to 32h per week work availability

Pay

We can afford to pay $40/h for this near-full-time position. Once you gain experience and seniority, we can increase this. You can read about our reasons for disclosing rewards in /jobs/.

Since this is a remote job, unless you are based in Germany, it would be best if you could invoice us for the hours you spent working for us.

Remote, off-time, behavior, and expectations

Our stances on these matters can be found in /jobs/. In short: you can work from anywhere in the world. Our virtual office is powered by Slack. Take time off as you see fit – all we ask is that you meet your own commitments and give us timely notice. We are looking for people who are kind, resourceful, curious, and can formulate and work towards their own goals.

Stack

Here's our stack. Familiarity with these would be nice. The ones with a checkmark are important. Needless to say, you can learn about all of these at Transloadit.

How to apply

Please send your:

• Basic info (name, age, interests, GitHub, Twitter, website if you have one)
• Motivation (max 100 words)

as a DM to https://twitter.com/transloadit