We’re looking for a support programmer to work with us as we build a safer, faster, better Basecamp. As well as working on Basecamp and our other apps, you’ll be an important part of our work on Basecamp, the company. You’ll be joining our existing support programmer (me!) and working as part of our Security, Infrastructure and Performance team in a fun and varied role that will help you to develop personally and professionally.
We want strong, diverse teams built from different backgrounds, experiences and identities. We’re ready for the ongoing work that goes into building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best work of your career. That starts with regularly working no more than 40 hours a week, and hopefully getting 8+ hours sleep a night. Our benefits are designed to support a sustainable, healthy relationship with your work.
Currently our team works from 32 different cities, spread across 6 countries. You can work from anywhere in the world, but your normal working day should have 4 hours or more overlap with Central Time (CST).
About you
Do you have questions?
Do you like finding answers?
Does helping people make your heart sing?
Can you approach problems calmly and compassionately?
Do you think clearly, and can you express yourself in English and in code?
About the job
Here are some examples of the kind of work you’ll be doing. You might not know how to do everything below, but you do know how to start looking and learning. Every single day, you’ll get to work across teams to support three major areas:
Making our customers happy.
- You’ll be helping our customers to perform tasks they can’t do easily in Basecamp itself. We refer to these as concierge-style requests. They often involve writing small snippets of Ruby and working in a console
- You’ll make it easier for companies to trust us by answering security and compliance questions
- Every day you’ll be supporting our wonderful support team, to help them to ask better questions and find better answers for our customers
- Developers who are working with our APIs sometimes need some help too, and you’ll be on hand to offer the right documentation, and suggestions on the best way to approach things
Working on our legacy
In the pursuit of answers, you’ll go delving into the codebase for all of our apps (including the very first Rails app!) to discover how things work. You’ll be comfortable looking at code, exceptions and logs, identifying problems and suggesting fixes.
Experience with Ruby, Rails and JavaScript would be very helpful, but if you have been using different languages and stacks, that’s fine too. Be sure to tell us all about it in your application.
As well as spelunking through our apps, you’ll work with people across Basecamp every day:
- Working with our ops team to track down mail delivery issues, or networking problems or SSL certificate fun
- Working with programmers to triage bugs, suggest fixes, and write code
- Exploring issues with our Android or iOS apps, and working with our mobile teams
- Support our QA team as they lead our feature retrospectives
Helping us find ways to be better
- Triaging security reports & identifying fixes
- Looking at reports of slowness in our apps and searching for the cause
- Researching & planning improvements across teams, like ending support for RC4, or taking part in PrivacyShield certification
- Looking at exceptions in our apps, and identifying fixes
- Providing thoughtful commentary on product pitches, ideas and suggested fixes based on what you have seen
- Investigating common cases, and coming up with ideas on how to reduce them
You’ll get support and trust every step of the way, and the freedom to make decisions to make things simpler, clearer, easier and more honest.
If this sounds like the kind of work you’d love to do, please apply. We’re especially interested in applications from folks in the early stages of their programming careers. If you know someone who would be perfect, tell them to apply! We’re accepting applications until February 3rd, 2017. Your cover letter is your chance to shine, so take it!
