First off, we don't have many policies, but we have published some thoughts about hiring over at /jobs/. This explains some of the choices that we make and could help you figure out if we would be a cultural match.

If you don't know Transloadit yet, here is some information about our company.

Transloadit

Transloadit is a file uploading and encoding service. Launched by 3 developers who met through open source in 2009, customers have been loving our clever API and top-notch support ever since.

We are the company that has been running Node.js in production the longest. As such, we have had to invent a few wheels, which we subsequently shared with the world. Most notably: node-mysql, node-formidable and node-retry. These are modules that are now industry standards for dealing with MySQL, file uploads and networked/unreliable systems. We have also contributed a lot to Node.js itself.

Our latest open source project is 'tus'. tus is our most ambitious open source project to date: its goal is to change the way the world does file uploading. tus is an open standard for resumable file uploads that was started by Transloadit, and has been collaborated on by employees at Google, Yahoo, the director of engineering at Vimeo, an author of HTTP/1.1, and the creator of ZeroMQ. We are writing implementations of this protocol for all popular languages, so that developers around the globe can add drop-in, self-hosted reliable uploading to their projects. It is a layer on top of HTTP, so it is easy to reason about, inspect, extend and deploy in existing projects and infra.

Vimeo has already announced they will be adopting tus for all their video uploading.

In many ways we, owe our existence to open source. The founders met through its community, our API relies heavily on open source tools, we meet potential employees through it, and it is how we get exposure for our service.

Since it has remained critical to our existence, we invest heavily in open source. We are currently doing that by:

  • Open sourcing the juiciest bits of our code
  • Sponsoring conferences and hackathons
  • Giving away free conference tickets on Twitter every month
  • Sharing our tech knowledge in articles
  • Contributing back (with cash, code, servers and infra expertise) to the giants on whose shoulders we stand, such as ImageMagick, Node.js and tus.

The Job

Ideally, we are looking for a CS student, or a perhaps a developer or bootstrapping founder with some time to spare, to help us maintain our SDKs (Node.js, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Go, Android, etc.), our bigger open source projects such as tus.io and uppy.io, and the static websites (e.g. Jekyll/Markdown) for those projects.

A line-art photo of a person tearing their shirt open to reveal an open source logo underneath. Never mind the random artwork - this position is for Girls too!

You will be expected to go over open issues and pull requests, seeing which ones can be closed and which ones can be implemented. You will be asked to engage in wildly varying technical challenges, as well as communicate with people from all over the world. Hence, a broad interest and great communication skills are important assets for potential candidates. If you aren't familiar with a few of the languages or platforms mentioned above, that is okay, but the more of those you are comfortable with, the better. If really necessary, we could outsource some of the required maintenance, but you can also always call in the help of our team for particular issues. We are always on Slack, and always willing to lend a hand.

This job is for 12 hours a week.

Pay

We can spend USD 20 an hour on this part-time position, meaning up to ~1000 USD per month. You can read about our reasons for disclosing this in /jobs/.

It would be easiest if you could invoice us for your time spent working for us. That way, you will also get to keep most of this budget.

If you want, we can also put you on the payroll. That means you would technically be employed in Germany though, meaning half of it is lost on taxes/insurances and, unless you are from Germany, we might have some additional legal hurdles to take.

Remote, off-time, behavior, and expectations

Our stances on these matters can be found in /jobs/. In short: you can work from anywhere in the world. Our virtual office is powered by Slack. Take off-time as you see fit, all we ask is that you give us the heads-up and don't set expectations higher than you can meet. We are looking for people that are kind, resourceful and curious.

How to Apply

Maybe you're already mailing with the founders. If not, and you're interested, please send:

  • Basic info (name, age, interests, website if you have one)
  • Your GitHub account
  • Motivation

to hello@transloadit.com, and please keep it brief! 😄

» Thanks for your interest, but this vacancy has been filled.