michaelmaindaljensem / engineering

Slim.AI - All Things Engineering

Imagine the future where you are able to build and run your cloud-native apps without getting a PhD in infrastructure first and without spending countless hours fighting the cloud infrastructure to have your application running in production. If it's the future you want to see, join us to redefine how DevOps is done and to create the next generation of tools around it.

The current product is focusing on removing friction around container lifecycle management and container adoption for various virtualized, kubernetes and serverless environments.

You'll join a small team that comes from traditional and non-traditional backgrounds globally distributed with people in Hawaii and Kenya and various places in between. You'll be working closely with the founders. You'll also get a chance to work with the existing open source projects and you'll get support open sourcing new projects.

Every move you make will have a significant impact on the team and the product we are building. You'll create something that hasn't been done before solving many of your own problems and you'll have an opportunity and our support to make your work visible to the dev community.

We are a remote first company where open source and contributing to the developer community are fundamental to our success. Your ability to communicate and collaborate internally and externally with others will be critical to your success and to the success of the entire company. You don't need to be an extrovert, but you can't expect to work alone no matter how great you are. Software engineering is a team 'sport'. You also need to have empathy for the open source users using their feedback as an opportunity to improve.

We consider diverse and non-traditional backgrounds a huge strength in our engineers. We don't require degrees from the top universities, but we won’t hold it against you if you do have it :-) It's ok even if you don't have a degree at all as long as you know your craft and you can successfully collaborate with your team members. We don't expect you to know everything and we'll create an environment for you to learn and to grow your professional career.

We will treat you in a professional manner and we expect professional behavior from you as well. We are all human and conflicts, misunderstandings and disagreements will happen; however, being mean and disrespectful will not be tolerated.

We are in the early stage of our journey, but we have enough money to get us through COVID and beyond.

Engineering Principles

As a remote first engineering organization distributed all over the world we are creating a modern cloud native platform built on top of open source and we adopted these engineering principles to be successful:

1. We use what we build.

2. We share a common cloud-native mindset and a platform thinking DNA.

3. We create stage appropriate designs that can evolve and that can be thrown away when necessary.

4. We optimize for evolvable architecture building an extensible and composable system with disposable components using an API first approach.

5. We optimize our designs for people first and machines second.

6. We care about the entire system we are building considering the needs of our teammates and the impact of the design decisions we make.

7. We learn together.

8. We share knowledge and give back to the tech community.

9. We have a written down and transparent culture that enables our remote first asynchronous approach to engineering.

10. We have a lightweight engineering process based on trust, self-alignment and visibility.

See the Engineering Principles page to learn more.

Your Development Environment

We use Github for the open source components and we use Gitlab for the SaaS platform.

The open source components provide the core capabilities for the SaaS, but they can always be used on their own just like the HashiCorp tools (e.g., Terraform).

The capabilities that focus on the individual developer and application value are integrated in the open source components and the capabilities that provide a more integrated end to end experience and the capabilities that benefit teams and enterprises are included in the SaaS.

We have a hybrid developer environment where we can run various SaaS components locally and in the cloud. We also hope to open source the tools that help us do that in a more efficient way.

Current Tech Stack Highlights

Open Source

• Go
• Containers
• Github

SaaS

• AWS (serverless, containers, EC2)
• Vue.js/Nuxt.js-based frontend (with D3-based visualizations)
• Node.js-based BFF (Backend For Frontend)
• Go-based platform backend.
• Gitlab

What You Won't See

No Java, no Jenkins, no JIRA (ever :-)).

Application Design:

• gRPC
• GraphQL
• JWTs
• Shell scripts as production application code

Infrastructure:

• Manual infrastructure provisioning and configuration
• Ad-hoc application or infrastructure automation
• Legacy configuration management tools (e.g., Chef, Puppet, Ansible) for application and infrastructure automation

What We Are Looking For

We are looking for people who'll be excited to be a part of the engineering team in an early stage startup during its inception phase.

We are looking for people who want to help us shape the next stage of the containerization revolution and who want to help us define the era of the application centric cloud infrastructure.

Key Qualities We Care About

• A cloud-native mindset and a platform thinking DNA
• Modern application design patterns and tooling background
• Ability and desire to learn a lot

Open Engineering Roles

• Technical Writer
• Core Engine - Open Source Engineer
• Core Engine (low level) - Linux System and Kernel Development
• Full Stack - (Jr/Mid/Sr) - Vue.js/Nuxt.js/Node.js/Go
• Backend Platform - (Jr/Mid/Sr)

If you are interested in one of these roles, don't send a resume. Write a short note instead... Share your thoughts about cloud-native and what it means to you in addition to the relevant information about you. Email it to join.engineering and use the company domain (without www).

Interview Process

We don't do Leetcode or the usual trivia-based puzzles and whiteboarding interviews. We customize the interview process based on the candidates and their background to make sure we get to learn as much possible and to see how working together can be mutually beneficial.

General Steps:

• Step 1: Intro with the CTO (for you to learn more about what we do and our engineering principles)
• Step 2: Open source project code walk through (an opportunity for us to have meaninful technical discussions and an opportunity to learn about how you think, how you communicate and how you work with others)
• Step 3 (depending on the role): A domain-specific discussion if the role requires deep knowledge in a specific technical domain
• Step 4 (optional): Meet the team (for you to learn more about the team you'll be working with)

Laptop Options

• Pixelbook Go (Linux*)
• Dell XPS 13 - Developer Edition (Linux)
• Dell Precision 5550 Mobile Workstation (Linux)