Head of Engineering & Infrastructure

At FetLife we are looking for a Head of Engineering and Infrastructure who will fully own our engineering and infrastructure teams, keep FetLife fast and reliable for over 12 million members, and free the rest of the leadership team to focus on product and growth.

You will be the person we trust and count on for everything related to engineering and infrastructure. The buck stops with you.

The Job

As FetLife's Head of Engineering & Infrastructure, you will be responsible for:

• Building and leading high performing engineering and infrastructure teams
• Holding the teams accountable to deliver product and infrastructure projects on time and to spec
• Developing and sharing a clear vision for engineering and infrastructure that sets the team up to best serve the community
• Collaborating with the leadership and product teams on product strategy to help craft simple, effective, and efficient solutions
• Making sure engineering and infrastructure are the first to know when something is not working as expected and taking full ownership to fix issues before members notice
• Writing and maintaining core processes for engineering and infrastructure and making sure they are followed by all
• Reviewing and managing infrastructure costs to get the best performance, uptime, and reliability for every dollar spent
• Running the engineering and infrastructure teams on EOS, including clear scorecards, measurables, and weekly L10 meetings
• Creating an environment where great engineers want to work, grow, and are proud of the impact they have

In short, you will be responsible and accountable for the engineering and infrastructure teams, their decisions, and their outcomes.

What Success Looks Like

In your first year:

• We trust you and do not stress about engineering or infrastructure
• 90%+ of product and infrastructure projects ship on time and to spec
• Team runs on EOS with clear roles, numbers, scorecards, and L10s that everyone takes seriously
• We get more out of the same engineering and infrastructure investment through better coaching, process, and tooling
• Head of Product can focus on product instead of managing engineering and infrastructure

About You

We are looking for someone who has proven experience leading engineering and infrastructure teams at meaningful scale. You have worked on:

• High traffic, high availability systems
• Large user bases
• Large codebases and systems that aim to be simple and reliable

You embody our core values:

• Get shit done
• Team work makes the dream work
• 1% better everyday (have a growth mindset)
• Do the right thing

For this role, it is important you also:

• Are pragmatic and comfortable making tradeoffs
• Get to the root of issues instead of treating symptoms
• Keep things simple and avoid unnecessary complexity
• Have a positive, steady attitude even under load
• Take ownership and do not hide from hard problems or hard conversations

It is a plus if you:

• Have experience with EOS or similar operating systems for running teams
• Have worked in remote first companies that span multiple continents and timezones
• Are comfortable working on a platform that involves adult content, with a strong focus on consent and community safety

Because we are 100% remote, we:

• Highly value strong written communication
• Require you to travel at least four times a year to Canada for quarterly planning sessions
• Require regular availability between 2 pm and 7 pm CET, which is 8 am to 1 pm EST.
  • Require flexibility to serve the teams both in Europe and North America

About Us

FetLife is the largest kinky social network on this side of the Milky Way. We:

• Have over 12 million members and growing
• Grew 100% by word-of-mouth
• Serve over 3 billion requests a day

You can find our team here: https://fetlife.com/team

Our Tech Stack

Our platform is a majestic Rails monolith with a Vue.js and Typescript front end. We also use Rust for services and gems that require higher performance.

Details about our tech stack:

• Ruby on Rails monolith
• Vue.js with Typescript on the front-end
• Rust for services that need to be performant
• PostgreSQL for our main databases
• ScyllaDB for our activity feeds
• Redis for session storage, queue management, and caching
• ElasticSearch for full-text search
• RSpec and Capybara for testing
• GitHub Actions for continuous integration and deployment
• Containers orchestrated with Kubernetes and Helm
• DataDog, New Relic, and Sentry for monitoring and alerting
• Terraform for infrastructure as code

Pay & Benefits

We use a standardised salary calculator for each position to ensure we are competitive, fair, and consistent. For this role, the range is between $182,000 and $272,000 USD per year, depending on experience.

Additionally, we offer:

• Paid time off:
  • 2 weeks vacation
  • 5 statutory holidays (e.g. Easter & Thanksgiving)
  • 2 weeks during Christmas
  • 4 day workweeks during July and August
• Annual company retreat (e.g. Malaga, Miami, Vancouver, and Montreal)
• Annual anniversary gift (200$ USD for every year with us, e.g. 4th anniversary is $800)
• Monthly streaming music subscription reimbursement
• Fully paid maternity and paternity leave

How to Apply

Send an email to [email protected]. In the email, please include:

• Brief introduction of yourself
• Tell us about the impact you have personally made on an engineering or infrastructure team you have led
• Link to your GitHub or GitLab account
• Link to your LinkedIn profile -and/or- a copy of your resume in PDF format

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to email us at [email protected]!