Hey there! We're looking for a new member to join the Ghost team, maybe that's you?

We're a non-profit organisation on a mission to create modern, independent publishing technology to power the future of online journalism.

This is not a rocket-ship. You won't find any unicorn glitter or exponential curves around here, just a real company with a sustainable business which has been profitable from year 1 and has been growing healthily ever since. Currently our annual revenue is $6,000,000+. We're very transparent about our mission and our metrics, you can read all about us.

Ghost is a full stack web application for running independent publications and newsletters, paving the way for the ever-growing creator economy. It’s one of the most popular modern open source projects in the world, and is used in by tens of thousands of creators and companies.

Our users range from some of the world's largest creators, vloggers, podcasters and makers, to mainstream publications like The Stanford Review and Harvard International Review. Companies use Ghost for their publishing needs too, so you'll see our product powering blogs for people like Apple, Square, DuckDuckGo, CloudFlare, Digital Ocean, Mozilla, Tinder and many, many more.

Ghost as a business is made up of two primary products:

• Ghost - An open source CMS/app which can be used for free by anyone
• Ghost(Pro) - A fully managed hosting platform with powerful automation

The platform is targeted at professional users, and in turn funds the entire company to build free, open source software for everyone.

About the job  

You'll be responsible for building and maintaining the tech we use at all levels in our stack: storage, databases and containerised applications all the way through to request routing, CDN integration and email deliverability. You'll also be involved in collaborations with other areas of the business - for example integrating Ghost(Pro) with billing and support systems.

All our infrastructure is managed and deployed through config management and supported by a lot of custom code - so being comfortable with git and software development (Node/Python) is important. Our infrastructure comprises more than 100 servers across two datacenters, running Ubuntu and managed with Saltstack, sitting behind a fairly deep CDN integration. Most common tech across our instances includes MySQL8, Varnish, OpenResty/Nginx, Docker, Gluster, and a lot of Node.js.

This role includes responsibility for being part of an on-call rota, but the team spans multiple timezones so incident management responsibilities typically aren't too arduous. All infrastructure roles at Ghost are inclusive of on-call responsibilities, and we do our best to be as flexible and open to working with everyone's schedules as possible.

Skills and experience 

• Strong experience with database administration as a core skill
  
• Experience and confidence in managing, deploying and maintaining complex projects across several different environments
  
• Experience specifically relating to web hosting at scale, containerisation and continuous delivery
  
• Strong communication, especially when identifying and responding to infrastructure failures
  
• Managing infrastructure requirements and optimisations based on app performance and user load scenarios
  
• Distributed systems, database clustering and replication management
  
• Platform monitoring and observability
  
• Backup and DR planning, plus common security issues and mitigation strategies

Who you are 

• Confidently independent. All teams at Ghost operate fairly autonomously, and all team members are responsible for helping make decisions about what needs to be done. 
• An active collaborator. We look for people who actively want critical feedback on their work early and often, and who get a kick out of refining and pushing what they do as a collaborative process because it creates a better end result.
  
• Meticulous about quality. Quality matters a great deal in everything we do, whether that's engineering, content or design — we care about creating things which we're proud of.
  
• A clear communicator. As a remote team which communicates almost exclusively through writing — concise, written communication is essential.
  
• Humble but opinionated. We enjoy working with smart people who have lots of ideas, yet are happy to discard their former opinions whenever a better way of doing things presents itself

We don't mind where you're based or what hours you work, but this role requires some working-hours overlap with the rest of our infrastructure team, based between Europe and Australia.

We value diversity of all types at Ghost and our team is made up of a kind, thoughtful group of people with a wide range of backgrounds. Some of us are single, others are married, while others are parents. We actively try to find people with different perspectives and experiences to the ones we already have.

Salary & benefits

The starting salary range for this position is $90,000 – $145,000 USD. Most offers we make fall somewhere in the middle of the range. The exact offer will be determined by a combination of your experience, and our interview process.

On top of that, we offer a range of benefits...

All jobs at Ghost come with

💵 Competitive salary
Based on role, skill, experience and location.

🌍 Work from anywhere
From a home office, or travel continuously if that's your thing. Everything we do is online. As long as you have wifi, you're all set.

💻 Hardware included
A new laptop + $500 office workspace setup budget.

🏢 Co-working covered
If you prefer to work from a co-working space, we'll help pay for it.

📚 Continue your personal development
There's a budget for attending conferences, taking courses, and purchasing books.

✈️ Team retreats
The last few trips have taken us to Dubai, Thailand, Austria & Egypt.

📅 Last Friday of the month off 
We close the office on the last Friday of each month. Enjoy!

🏝 Unlimited paid vacation
We close the office for 2 weeks each December, and encourage everyone to take regular time off from work to relax.

👶 Paid parental leave
When the time comes to welcome a new member of the family, we offer generous and fully paid parental leave.

📈 Regular pay reviews
Everyone at Ghost receives an annual pay review.

🧘‍♀️ Meeting-free focus
Most people at Ghost have 1 or 2 zoom calls a week at most. We like to keep calendars empty and leave plenty of space for focusing on creative work.

Who you'll be working with

Not the right role for you?

If this role isn't right for you, but you're interested in hearing about other roles that open up in future, you can subscribe to our careers mailing list! We never use this list for any promotional emails, marketing, or anything else.