I’m Looking for Remote Work, Hire Me!

My sabbatical is coming to close. I’ve had time to step back and ponder. Now it’s time to focus on the next step in my career. I’m ready for new work! If you’re hiring remote full time/part time team member, then keep reading so I can tell about me and what I’m looking for.

About Me

I’m a full stack engineer with ~8 years experience. I’m fully capable of architecting, designing, building, deploying, and operating web services. I prefer to work on backend services but also enjoy building websites. My last job at Saltside took me through the whole progression before ending up in a SRE role. The SRE role was a blast because I focused on improving production operations and deployment procedures, while writing code in various languages (shout out to the one true god: Bash!).

Beyond the tech, I’ve always strived to lead people and mentor my teammates. My most touching mentoring moment was teaching a teammate how to do TDD. He told me that learning TDD brought joy and confidence back to his work.

I’ve also been an active open source contributor, blogger, speaker, and educator. I try to educate and share as much knowledge as I can. Slashdeploy.com links to my video courses, DevOps blog posts, and webinars. My older blog mostly covers programming in Ruby and working with Rails. Here’s a some of my favorites:

• Advanced Caching in Rails (2011)
• Moving on From Rails (2011)
• Advanced Caching in Rails: Revised (2012)
• Advanced Caching in Rails (Frozen Rails 2012)
• Rediscovering the Joy of Design (2014)
• Application Architecture: Boundaries, Roles, & Patterns (WrocLove.rb 2014)
• Applications First, Frameworks Second Workshop (RailsConf 2014)
• The Ruby Community: The Next Version (2015)
• Shipping Code at Saltside: 2 Years on Docker (DevopsDays India 2016)
• Securing My Digital Life (2017)
• Real World AWS Practices (2017)
• Introduction to Kubernetes (2017)
• Introduction to Docker (2017)
• Production Ready Ruby (RubyConf India 2017)
• Migrated to Kubernetes: Day 20 Problems (2017)
• Building Our Helm Chart (2017)

Skills

I have a full stack skillset. This largely includes a mix of programming, infrastructure, databases, and various tooling knowledge. Here’s an overview:

• Ruby, Javascript, and Bash. Ruby is by far my most powerful tool. Although, you’ll find that I’m quick to write a ton of things with Bash.
• Containers, so Docker, Kubernetes, docker-compose, docker-machine, and many other things that tend to come along for the ride.
• AWS. It’s fair to say I’m an AWS guy. I’ve used AWS for years and run the majority of production systems on AWS. However I’m looking forward to branching out into GCP and Azure.
• Automation, so your Ansible, Puppet, VMs and various things to automate setup and deployment pipelines.

What I’m Looking For

Remote work is the top priority, the more async the better. I prefer to avoid teams that enforce time zone constraints (i.e. UTC to UTC+4 only). You can read my approach to evaluating a new engineering job. Roughly speaking I’m interested:

• Ready to start in about 1–2 months.
• No real preference on part-time/full-time/contract. I’m flexible here and will weight this against many other factors in my decision.
• ~10–15 people. I prefer small teams since forming silos is more difficult and (hopefully) the skill gap is not as pronounced.
• DevOps focused with an existing continuous deployment pipeline. I’ve had enough working with manual deployments and slow development cycles. Let’s go faster!
• Distributed systems. The more moving pieces the more fun there is.
• Containers in production. Really, no need to move backward — especially in 2018!
• Leadership/management opportunities. I like responsibility and decision making.
• Competitive salary. I have not been paid enough in the past.
• Preferably profitable or product focused. I’m not interested in joining a startup with a 3 year runway.

Interested?

Do you think your team is a good fit? I’d love to hear from you and get to know your team/company. Please email me at hi@ahawkins.me, tweet me, or find me on LinkedIn. Hopefully we can make it work.