Working at OpsStack

Customers are the heart of our company and our focus, for without them we simply would not exist, nor would we have any purpose at all.

Customers can be difficult and demanding, but that's there job; ours is to make them successful. We do this by listening to them, sometimes arguing and pushing back, but doing our very best to .

We always do what is right and good for the customer, even if it is not good for us; in fact, we must especially do our best for them when it’s bad for us.

Running the Ops World & supporting our customers is a team sport, which means we need to work hard to work together on our own team, and along with teams of teams.

This is not easy, as even a single team means a lot more communication, coordination, and effort, and teams of teams take even more to ensure everyone is doing the right thing all the time, 7x24.

But thinking about your teammates, the other teams, and of course the customer will greatly ease everyone’s efforts, make life easier, and lead to everyone’s success.

Communicating is the lifeblood of a company, a team, and a success. No one knows what you are doing, thinking, or planning unless you tell them. This is especially true for our customers who we are not here in person, are often under great pressure, or want to know what we are doing.

Communicate much more than you think you should, about everything. And the more urgent, stressful, or important the situation, the more you should communicate.

Our job is to run the world's Internet systems, for billions of people around the world. That’s a huge responsibility and really difficult to do at scale. So we must continuously improve everything we do, every day.

We are a learning organization, partly because we must continuously improve but also because what we do is very difficult and always requires new ideas, innovations, tools, and technology to service our customers.

We are a company, but also family and friends. We work hard together for long and sometimes stressful hours to support each other and our customers.

We need to be close, to like, and support each other as best we can, especially when things are difficult, personally, professionally, and otherwise.

We also need time for our own family and friends.

We have long prided ourselves in a diverse team, and strongly support and encourage a wide array of folks to join us in running the Operations world.

In China our diverse team hails from 15+ countries and a diverse set of cultures, norms, and languages.

Also in China, and in our previous startups, women lead most of our teams, including technology & operations.

We are big on getting stuff done. This is never easy in today's world, today's offices, and always-on tools like Slack, WeChat, etc.

But we must try hard to have many hours per day of focus and flow time, to handle everything we can in morning stand-ups and quick follow-ups, and not eat into people's afternoons of focus time. We'll tune as we go.

Not perfect, but important.

We are Silicon Valley folks, so we'll be headquartered there, probably on the Peninsula. At the same time, we'll be looking for one or more remote offices, not only in SF and the East Bay, but also in other North American areas.

However, we are not looking for remote home workers, as we strongly believe people work better together, even if it's 3-4 people going to an office in Des Moines. Thus we'll be recruiting in key areas in groups, and hope you can help.

We are an enterprise software company and our mission is to literally run the world, as things increasingly runs on-line and our product will manage the world's systems, eventually for billions of users. Something like SAP for Ops.

We take this responsibility VERY seriously, as should you. It's all fun & games until the customers loses a few million dollars due to something we could have done better.

We are not a game nor a consumer company, so we lack some of the 'fun' amusements of those companies, but we are fun in our own way, perhaps a bit more mature, but also more interesting. We promise fun, in our own way.

Well, as a startup, we aren't yet into the free lunches, gym memberships, free massages, subsidized parking, on-site yoga, etc. that seems standard in SF/Valley.

Part of that is we don't have an office yet, and while we love office massage as much as the next girl, frankly, if this is why you are choosing your work world for the next few years, perhaps we are not the best fit for you.

We are interested in what's best for our team, but perk-chasing is not our idea of fun - be here because it's the best and most interesting place for you, today and for your future - useful perks will accumulate over time.

Blame-based cultures are evil, simple as this. We try very hard to avoid this, instead focusing on what can be learned and how we can improve. Every failure, and we've had a lot of them, is an opportunity, if only we can all seize it.

Transparency is also important to trust and openness, so we've always shared all our errors and mistakes internally and with our customers, even when very painful to do so.