Overview

About Garden

Garden’s mission is to keep developers productive and happy in the cloud-native era.

Docker, Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies have made us better than ever at operating our systems in production, but the day-to-day development experience has been left lagging behind.

Developers spend less time in flow, and more time waiting for builds, debugging scripts, or otherwise fighting their tools. We’re here to fix that.

Our platform—which includes our open source core product—allows developers to work on distributed systems with remote, production-like dev environments, while enjoying the same fast and frictionless feedback loops we’ve come to expect when developing a single service locally.

It’s a platform that democratizes the kind of advanced developer tooling that only the largest software companies have the resources to build and maintain.

We’re still a small team and you’d be joining at a time where you can have a huge impact on our product and our culture. If you’ve ever thought to yourself that something’s not right with our modern development workflows, now’s your chance to help fix it!

What you’ll do

We recently released Garden Cloud, a platform for teams to complement our open-source core product. As a Senior Cloud Engineer, your main responsibility will be to work on the backend services of Garden Cloud and help guide its design and architecture.

More specifically:

  • You’ll work with the entire team in planning, designing, and building out the various components of the Garden Cloud platform.
  • You’ll spend the majority of your time “hands-on”, writing application code. From CRUD-like API endpoints to data processing and build systems. We have an ambitious roadmap with some non-trivial features.
  • You’ll use your experience with distributed systems and cloud native technology to guide the design and implementation of features that will be used by other cloud native engineers.
  • You’ll use containers, Kubernetes, and other cloud native technology as part of your day-to-day work.

What we’re looking for

Garden solves problems for teams developing distributed systems that can run on Kubernetes. We’re looking for someone that understands the challenges that these teams face, and wants to join us in building developer tooling that helps our users overcome them.

More specifically:

  • You have extensive experience with distributed systems (or micro-services) and the cloud native technologies used to build and run them.
  • You have 5+ years of experience as a backend engineer. Experience with Node.js and Typescript is a plus, but not a requirement.
  • You’re passionate about developer tooling and productivity.
  • You empathize with fellow cloud native developers, and understand the value in bringing them a good, frictionless developer experience.
  • You’re happy to work with a team that is still figuring a lot of things out, and values trust, openness, and collaboration while doing so.

 

Our Process

We’re a small team that tries to keep things simple and lean—and that applies to our interview process as well.

The very first step is a 30 – 45 minute intro call with James, our Head of People. This is where we’ll discuss the role, salary, and availability.

Next step is a 30-minute call with Eythor, our CTO. The goal is to give both parties a chance to get to know one another and ask questions and discuss the role and culture at Garden.

After that there’s a 60-minute technical interview with two of our engineers. There are no string reversal algorithms though. Instead, we anchor the conversation in things you’ve actually done in the past and dig deep into those.

The final step is a 60-minute presentation where you present work you’ve done to the engineering team. Depending on the role, this may be something you’ve done in the past or an assignment we design. We want everyone involved in the process, so this is also a chance for you to meet more people from the team and vice versa.