Support engineer
Being a part of the support staff at Fog Creek Software is different. To start with, we let our customers decide if they want to pay us or not. Seriously. If our customers are not amazingly happy, they get their money back with no questions asked. Any old support job can make you responsible for the customer's happiness. Our front line staff are empowered to make our customers happy. Usually, it means tapping a broad range of resources. Hardware, software, sysadmins, and engineers are there when you need them.
Being a support engineer at Fog Creek is like no other support position. You'll be a full Member of Technical Staff, working in the same plush New York City office with the product development team, with full benefits from day one. The engineers you support--and who support you--know how to fix problems once and for all. And they do it. You won't spend your days making excuses for an engineering team that only wants to do the sexy parts of software development. The devs you support are coding animals; they write compilers for fun. Fixing things for real is what they do.
You will be consistently challenged and engaged. The kinds of problems you'll be working on are diverse and interesting. This is a real problem solving job, not just repetitive troubleshooting. You'll be expected to learn things on the fly. You'll use a constantly changing tool set to solve a constantly changing array of problems.
You'll also participate in and moderate our Stack Exchange forums.
This is a great job for someone who is energized by the possibilities offered by programming but is less excited about chasing down weird text-encoding corner cases and poring over billing code. True software engineering isn't for everyone, and we believe there's room in the world of software for people like you to have strategic, challenging, fulfilling jobs. There's room for some coding in this position. The amount will be determined largely by your skills in the .NET arena, but there's always room for using things like Ruby, Python, or JQuery to do the kind of constant improvement and automation that keeps our team small, efficient, and strategic.
Strategy
The customer-facing employees in an organization often have the best information about pain points in a product, but they're rarely given a spare moment to think about potential improvements.
We believe that you can't be strategic about a job like support when you're always communicating. You just have to spend some time thinking in order to mine the incoming flow for strategic insights. We use relentless automation and software improvement to give our support team what's referred to as "slack." Slack is breathing room to think about ways to make your job easier or better. It's when you're doing this that you're providing the most value to the rest of the organization, so we make sure it's part of the job.
Requirements
- A broad technical curiosity and proven technical understanding. You've probably dabbled in a bunch of different languages.
- Bachelors' degree or equivalent
- The ability to communicate clearly and positively through written and spoken English
- Permanent legal right to work in the US
- This position is in our office in New York City. No telecommuting.
One or more of the following skills would be helpful:
- Knowledge of distributed version control systems like Mercurial
- Strong SQL
- Internet troubleshooting experience (Fiddler2, Firebug, etc)
- Any .NET language
- Rock Band skills
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Free gym membership
- Free MetroCard
- Free lunch
- Free soft drinks and snacks
- Comprehensive health insurance plan
- 401(k) retirement plan with matching
- Stock plan
- Generous parental leave policy
- Flextime
- Four weeks paid vacation
- Long term / Short term disability
About Fog Creek Software
Fog Creek Software is a small, entrepreneurial software company in New York City founded in 2000. Our key products are FogBugz and Copilot; both have been very successful and we have another major product under development. We bootstrapped ourselves without outside investment and have been profitable from the beginning.
Fog Creek Software, Inc. does not discriminate in employment matters on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or any other protected class. We support workplace diversity.
To apply, please email us at jobs@fogcreek.com, attaching a current resume in HTML, Word, Plain Text or PDF format. In the body of the email, explain why you would be a good fit for this job. If you have a website, send us the URL.
