Infrastructure Engineer

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Infrastructure Engineer

We're looking for talented infrastructure engineers to take our Ghost(Pro) platform to the next order of magnitude in scale, reliability and performance 🚀

Full-time · Remote

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, OpenAI, 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.

As the company grows, we’re looking for an experienced infrastructure engineer to join the team and lead the development of our Ghost(Pro) platform and services. This is a key role with plenty of freedom to help architect a real production system which is already serving over a billion requests each month - with a ton of room for improvement.

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.

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.

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

Joe 🇬🇧

Infrastructure Engineer

James 🇦🇺

Platform Lead

David 🇬🇧

Infrastructure Engineer

Filip 🇵🇱

Infrastructure Engineer

Our hiring process 

We’re profitable, AKA we have unlimited runway, and we have very healthy revenue growth. There's no investor pressure, time limit, or need to hire as many people as fast as possible to fill a fancy office. We want to keep the team small, automate as much as possible with robots, build great software, and enjoy our work. Those are the things we optimise for. If that sounds like a good fit for you, then we’d encourage you to get in touch.

Our hiring process and timeline can vary from role to role, but typically you can expect:

Step 1: We'll review your application against the needs of team.

Step 2: A video call with a member of the operations team so we can get to know each other a little better. It's an informal call, there's nothing to prepare.

Step 3: A second video call, usually with the hiring manager and another member of the team. This call has a more technical focus and gives you the opportunity to find out what might be like to be a member of the Ghost team.

Step 4: A paid trial project - typically 20-30 hours of work. This provides a great opportunity to understand what it's like to work with each other, prior to pursuing a full time offer.

Step 5: A final interview to review the trial project.

Step 6: An offer 🎉


How to apply  🚀

The button below will take you to the application form for this position where you can tell us a little more about yourself. We generally get lots of applications for each open position, so please take your time and give plenty of detail when filling out details in the form!

Women and minorities of any description are especially encouraged to apply.

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.