Today, we are announcing Anton Koldaev as the newest member of our operations team! Anton hails from Moscow and recently worked at the first Russian-based cloud hosting company.

In David’s recent post on remote working, there were a number of comments about investing in more junior or less experienced individuals. Anton is 24 and a great example of that and quickly won us over during his 30 day trial as a junior member of our team.

How we hired Anton

Anton saw our job board post via an old colleague’s tweet and responded with a well-written email to us. We reviewed his resume and gave a traditional operations task to complete: Deploy Redmine to EC2 using Chef, and document the process.

Anton not only did an excellent job from the operational side of things, he was the only applicant to use the Redmine instance to document his work. In addition, he was the only applicant to take a page from tally and build a little Campfire integration for code pushes, deployment notifications, etc.

Impressed with Anton’s work on the trial project, each member of the team had a chat with him on Skype. (We also talked to his references who all had great things to say.) As a team we agreed that Anton would be a good contractor, and offered him a 30 day trial.

Anton started with documentation, and worked his way through projects such as upgrading our Chef server, deploying new hardware for Basecamp and rebuilding our staging database servers. Near the end of his trial, Anton was able to get a visa to visit Will in the UK for a week of co-working and in depth learning about our operations.

Welcome Anton!