Senior Customer Reliability Engineer

Published on April 13, 2024

Building the future of cloud & software development Aptible's mission is to empower developers to focus on their ideas, not their infrastructure. To get there, we're building an application-focused platform as a service that is both great for companies just starting out and great for companies that are scaling.

About Aptible
Our Mission and Vision
At Aptible, we envision a world where developers achieve more with less infrastructure. We’re building the platform that empowers developers at companies of all stages of development to move beyond the traditional method of managing infrastructure—DIY with expert infrastructure and platform engineers on AWS, GCP, or Azure. We’ve done this through our secure, compliant, reliable, and scalable Platform as a Service that’s been used by thousand of developers, hundreds of companies, and dozens of publicly traded/unicorn companies since 2013. As we move forward, we’re doubling down on making it easy to get started with Aptible for even seed stage companies while also increasing support for advanced or bespoke use cases that enterprises require.
Our Team
Aptible describes its commitment to remote work as 'Remote Forever,' because we’ve been remote since we were founded in 2013. We've always invested heavily in company culture, perhaps more so than any team of our size. Employees often highlight our team's "thoughtfulness, energy, and grit" and our relentless pursuit of improvement.
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
We deeply understand the value of bringing together a team with different perspectives, educational backgrounds, and life experiences, and we prioritize diversity within our team. We encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply.

About This Role

Overview
Hi! I’m Ben, Director of Customer Experience at Aptible. We’re hiring for a Customer Reliability Engineer (CRE) on our team, a role that combines broad skills in cloud platform hosting and software development. We’re proud of the excellent support we provide our customers, and we believe a key part of this is maintaining a team of competent, motivated engineers who can relate to our users, who are often software engineers and contribute code back to the product our customers use to host their most critical workloads.
In a recent survey, our team reported spending approximately 70% of their time in customer support functions and 30% in project work, including software enhancements and maintenance. As we grow our team, we plan to maintain and balance this workload while we keep a fanatical focus on supporting our customers.
This is a challenging and rewarding position. We have continuous opportunities to build meaningful relationships with our customers, and our team is a supportive, tight-knit group that has each others’ backs at all times. Please consider our requirements below, and if you meet the “must-haves” list below, please apply confidently. I look forward to meeting with you.
You Should Apply If (Must-Haves):
  • You are excited about mixing up ticket and chat-based support in addition to software development work, informed by customer interactions. Our team is focused on providing best-in-class customer support, so you should be excited about being on the front lines with our customers.
  • You can consistently work Pacific Time Zone hours. This position is a remote position that will require working hours in the Pacific Time Zone, 9am-5pm, and occasionally outside these hours (Please see “You Shouldn’t Apply If” for more context.)
  • Your written communication is highly effective and is one of your strongest skills. We’ll put this to the test during the interview process, and the ideal candidate will come with confidence that they can shine here.
  • You have experience writing software deployed to scaled production systems. We prefer experience with Ruby on Rails and/or React, but candidates with experience in other stacks are encouraged. While we have flexibility on the depth of experience here, preference will be given to candidates who can bring the most relevant experience to bear.
You Shouldn't Apply If:
  • Customer-facing, interrupt-driven workloads are not sustainable for you. While we do take thoughtful approaches to give dedicated space to our team members working on project work, there are times when customer demand and/or team availability require regular interruptions to your planned day.
  • Periodically working outside of a 9-5 schedule is not doable for you. While we certainly do whatever is reasonable to keep work-life balance sustainable for our entire team, there are times when the CRE Team, as a whole or individually, will work outside of their regular hours. These include, but are not limited to: 
    • Upstream incidents that require “all hands on deck” attention to support our customers. These are quite rare, but when they occur, we come together to do what the day requires.
    • Off-hours customer maintenance: Occasionally, customers may need one of our team members to perform after-hours maintenance, such as in-place database upgrades or environment migrations. We take turns doing these tasks and offer comp time to help ease this periodic burden.
Outcomes
First 3 Months
  • Begin working side-by-side with our supportive team of CREs, who will help you hit the ground running. You’ll start with pairing sessions balanced with self-directed training to ensure you have the right balance of learning that matches your preferences and needs.
  • Depending on your skill set, we’ll point you toward enhancements and bug fixes for relevant components of our platform. We’ll provide learning support from within our team or our product engineering team, depending on the needs of each project.
First 6 Months
  • You’ll own a day per week where you’re triaging our support queue, assigning out tickets to the rest of the team, and triaging chat-based support.
  • You’ll frequently contribute to one or more of our platform codebases.
  • You’ll be actively contributing to and improving our customer-facing and internal documentation.
  • You will have taken advantage of our generous PTO and disconnected and recharged.
First 12-18 Months
  • You’ll be an expert on our platform, will be contributing regularly to our platform’s code, and will have taken part in training another new team member.
Compensation at Aptible
The projected salary range for this position is $144,050 - $194,588. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position across all U.S. locations. Within the range, individual pay is determined by a range of factors, including but not limited to job-related competencies, experience, and knowledge. The projected salary range is just one component of Aptible’s total compensation package for employees.
Employee Benefits at Aptible
  • Work from Anywhere: Enjoy the flexibility of working from home, a local co-working space, or your favorite coffee shop.
  • Open PTO Policy: We encourage you to take the time you need, when you need it — for any holiday or matter of personal importance.
  • Paid Parental Leave: We offer job-protected Paid Time Off — 14 Weeks, Fully Paid — for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child.
  • Learning & Development Stipend: We offer an annual stipend of $3,000 USD to use towards experiences that improve you professionally and inform your work at Aptible.
  • Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance: We offer comprehensive health care for employees, with 100% of premiums paid by Aptible.
  • Hardware & Software: We help you create your ideal office setup and provide any software you’ll need.
  • Company Travel: We come together in-person at least two to three times per year, in locations around the globe.
Our Interview Process
We seek to make the experience of interviewing with us as delightful, efficient, fair, respectful, and transparent as possible.
A typical process at Aptible might include the following steps. Please note that this may vary by role, and details will be provided to you early on in the process.
  1. Introduction to Aptible with the Hiring Manager
  2. 2-3 Skills-Based Interviews with Aptible Team Members
  3. Take-Home Project (You will be compensated for completing this.)
  4. References
If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let your Recruiting Coordinator or Hiring Manager know.