Software Engineer (Telepresence)

Ambassador Labs (formerly Datawire), the cloud native developer experience leader, enables developers to code, ship, and run applications faster and easier than ever. Maker of top open source projects, including and , Ambassador Labs delivers a for Kubernetes that integrates the development, deployment, and production infrastructure for developers and organizations worldwide including Microsoft, PTC, NVidia, and Ticketmaster. Ambassador Labs is a remote-first company, backed by top investors including Insight Partners, Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Four Rivers Group.

We are looking to hire engineers that care as much about empowering developers as we do and have embraced the cloud native phenomenon that is taking over the world.

About the Job

You will work on the commercial product, state of the art software that accelerates speed and collaboration of engineering teams' Kubernetes Development by seamlessly joining local environments to a remote Kubernetes cluster. At Ambassador Labs we work in six week development cycles where we build features that make our customers’ lives better. We then have two weeks during which you are free to work on whatever you want that benefits the business and our customers - you might do some self-directed learning, improve your tools, or maybe even work on a demo for an exciting new idea you had.

Your team uses Notion to plan and track the work, Figma for UI design, Markdown for documentation, GitHub Actions and CircleCI for continuous integration, Docker Hub for the resulting images, and of course Slack and Zoom. We have a semi-monthly all-company (Zoom) meeting to stay current on all the things, but we are primarily a written, asynchronous culture. We try hard to minimize meetings. We are firm believers in self-service DevOps and owning one’s code in production, so currently on-call responsibility is shared among all engineers at Ambassador. That is currently one week being on-call every three months.

We are a supportive, collaborative environment, and help is always at hand from your on-call EM, runbooks, and escalation policies.

Here’s a bit more insight into what your work life will be like as an engineer on the Telepresence team at Ambassador Labs:

• You’ll work primarily in Golang.
• You’ll work on Linux or Mac: some of us work on one platform, some on the other, each choosing whichever platform makes us the most productive.
• You’ll also use your favorite IDE or editor; although we use different ones, we’re oddly free of those silly “mine is the best” discussions.
• You’ll work on our local development product as part of a distributed team building a feature, or reviewing open source community PRs, or improving performance and scalability, etc., in six-week development cycles, and then you’ll cool down between cycles doing self-directed learning, improving your tools, or maybe even hacking up a demo of an exciting new idea of yours.
• You and your team will use GitHub issues and ZenHub or Notion to plan and track the work, Markdown for documentation, CircleCI for continuous integration, Docker Hub for the resulting images, and of course Slack and Zoom. You’ll have a weekly all-company (Zoom) meeting to stay current on all the things, but we try hard to minimize the number of scheduled meetings in order to maximize focus time.

About You

You are an engineer who enjoys developing products and you consider yourself a networking and distributed systems aficionado. At the core, you are motivated by figuring out ways for developers to own their work through the power of microservices and Kubernetes. You’re driven by understanding customers and their problems. You move with purposeful action and, most importantly, you pride yourself on execution.

We’re looking for candidates with a strong track record of putting Golang to use to bring products to life. You’ve already had some direct exposure to Kubernetes and have a passion for creating WOW experiences while at the same time making continuous improvements. Have a great idea? Act on it! You don’t have to go through layers of bureaucracy to get things done at Ambassador Labs (first of all because that’s against our philosophy, and secondly because we don’t have layers of bureaucracy!).

How to Apply

We are looking forward to hearing from you. We move quickly. We don’t need to talk to 20 other candidates to make a decision, so if the fit feels right on both sides, you can be part of the team as soon as in a few weeks. You will do 4 interviews, all remotely over Zoom:

1. People person, covering experience and the role
2. Hiring manager, covering your approach to work and the role
3. Software Engineer, a technical code walk-through
4. VP Engineering to answer questions and talk more about culture

We run a culture of mentorship and learning so please do not be surprised to find other team members join your interviews. It is our way of training more interviewers, by having an additional person observe and take notes.

We don’t do algorithms, off-the-cuff coding sessions, or brainteasers: we want to hear about your real-life experiences and the users that you’ve made happy. Ambassador Labs is an equal opportunity employer, and we specifically welcome applications from under-indexed groups in our industry. Don't let the confidence gap stop you from applying: if you don't meet 100% of the criteria but we sound like your sort of place, please apply anyway! This is a significant career move that’s well worth considering. We appreciate you giving us that consideration, and we promise to give you our full attention in return. Talk to you soon!