Fly.io takes container images and converts them into fleets of Firecracker VMs running on our own hardware around the world. We make it easy to run applications near users, whether they’re in Singapore, Seattle, or Sao Paolo. Try it out; if you’ve got a working container already, it can be running here in less than 10 minutes.

Right now, support at Fly.io is handled through a public forum at community.fly.io. We have an active, helpful community, and the Fly.io team is always around for backup (and sometimes head-on) assistance.

The Fly.io team's M.O. is to help people figure out how to diagnose and troubleshoot their issues for themselves. They can then resolve the same problem quickly on their own if it pops up again. More importantly, if they get really good at it, users can pay it forward when someone else needs help with a similar problem down the road.

This has worked really well, because the more we can get people talking to each other and us about Fly.io, the better it is for everyone. But some users need intensive support, and we need a support engineer to help with that.

We're launching paid plans soon that will involve additional modes of support — email, Slack, and maybe others — and we need help wrangling all these pieces so everyone's taken care of. A lot of this job is triage and helping customers learn how to get help for themselves. It also involves negotiating our team dynamics, knowing when to ask for help and how to get help fast when it's really needed.

About us, and about the job:

We're a small team, almost entirely technical, and product engineering often directly supports customers, which isn't something we want to change. Part of this role is facilitating those conversations so that customers are giving us relevant troubleshooting information that can go to the right team. This includes initial triage, and then asking for logs, files, etc to help narrow the problem. In a lot of cases, that might be enough to help customers diagnose and resolve the problem directly. If not, you'll collect enough detail to get to the right team to help resolve it.
We are active in developer communities, including our own at community.fly.io. The support engineer can play a big role in this community by adding meaningful troubleshooting and diagnosis information in most posts.
Virtually all customer communication is in writing. We are a global company, but most of our communication is in English. Clear writing in English is essential.
We are remote, with team members in Colorado, Quebec, Chicago, London, Spain, Virginia, Brazil, and Utah. Most internal communication is also written, and often asynchronous. You'll want to be comfortable with not getting an immediate response for everything, but also know when you need to get an immediate response for something.
We are an unusually public team; you'd want to be comfortable working in open channels rather than secretively over in a dark corner.
This could be a great job for someone who loves customer support and who wants more experience diving into and solving complicated technical problems. It could also be a great role for someone with a few years of support experience who wants to expand into a developer role eventually.
We’re a real company – hopefully that goes without saying – and this is a real, according-to-Hoyle full-time job with health care for US employees, flexible vacation time, hardware/phone allowances, the standard stuff. The compensation for this role is $90k-$120k USD plus equity.

What you'll do:

Keep an eye on all the places that customers might ask for support - email, Slack, Community, etc. - and figure out the best way to respond. The response might change depending on the issue, and that's ok!
Answer a pretty broad range of questions — sometimes the question is about deploying an app, sometimes a problem is because of a networking issue, and sometimes it requires some digging into log files to figure out where to start looking. You won't be responsible for answering every problem! But it will help if you can quickly triage them, and can start people on the right path for getting a problem solved.
Triage issues, get help from other teams if needed, and provide useful information in most responses. Status updates help customers feel heard — this is good! Actionable troubleshooting steps along with the updates are even better.
Monitor active support issues to make sure things are moving toward some kind of resolution.
Create and update documentation for questions that are answered more than a few times. Since we want to help customers be self-sufficient whenever we can, the most useful docs will not just include answers, but also troubleshooting steps and key data customers can collect to help them diagnose problems.

You'll be good at this job if you:

Have good instincts for balancing customer demands with healthy boundaries. Your favorite interactions are the ones where you taught a customer how to solve their own problem.
Are comfortable with software development. Our customers are developers, so it is helpful if you have some experience building apps (even a simple one!), and bonus points if you are familiar with how it runs on Fly.io. None of that is required, especially if you are great pointing people in the right direction. It is a great opportunity to learn how build and launch apps on Fly.io, though!
Have fun getting absorbed in a tricky new problem, but also know when to cut bait.
Like some structure, but are comfortable with not having a standard playbook for most problems. You also like putting some structure in place where there isn't any, and are open to trying new things if something isn't working.

You'll know you're succeeding in this job if:

You respond to support questions within 2 to 24 hours. (This does not necessarily mean they are resolved in that timeframe!)
Customers know what to expect when you respond to their support questions. They know what they should tell you about their problem, and they have a realistic idea of what to expect back from us.
Support questions are handed off to others with enough information to get the problem closer to diagnosis or resolution.
You are helping to turn most support questions turn into support documentation.

How We Hire People

We are weird about hiring. We’re skeptical of resumes and we don’t trust interviews (we’re happy to talk, though). We respect career experience but we aren’t hypnotized by it, and we’re thrilled at the prospect of discovering new talent.

The premise of our hiring process is that we’re going to show you the kind of work we’re doing and then see if you enjoy actually doing it; “work-sample challenges”. Unlike a lot of places that assign “take-home problems”, our challenges are the backbone of our whole process; they’re not pre-screeners for an interview gauntlet.

For this role, we’re going to ask you to respond to a couple of sample support questions that we often see from customers. We'll also ask you to identify some possible topics for support documentation.