Platform Engineer - Q2 2024

Planning Center, established in 2006, has grown to support over 80,000 churches worldwide. As an independent company, we pride ourselves on being debt-free with no outside investors. Churches use our tools to communicate and connect with their congregations, organize information, and coordinate events. We’re committed to building great products that solve real problems using web and mobile products.

Our team enjoys the flexibility of remote work, utilizing tools like Asana, Slack, Notion, and Zoom for collaboration. We gather quarterly at our main office in Carlsbad, CA, fostering our work relationships.

You’ll be responsible for maintaining and improving our infrastructure, development tools, and automated services as we grow to support 100,000 churches and beyond. Our Platform team is heavily invested in the AWS ecosystem, so you'll work with Aurora MySQL, Elastic Container Service (ECS), Lambda, S3, SNS, DynamoDB, CloudFormation, and EC2. Other key parts of our stack include Ruby on Rails, OpenSearch, and Datadog.

What a typical week might look like:

• Increasing our alert coverage and creating informative dashboards in Datadog
• Analyzing query performance in MySQL, validating and running database migrations, or restoring a table from a backup
• Architect and write a new internal tool or automation for a product team
• Deploy a service to ECS or Lambda
• Produce and maintain documentation on installations, incidents, and procedures
• Help with log collection and analysis
• Troubleshoot application performance issues
• Implement or update a security requirement for compliance

We run an on-call rotation so you will have to feel comfortable with participating in the rotation on a schedule.

We offer a culture that emphasizes continuous learning, work-life balance, and a meaningful impact on our customer community. Our Core Values shape our work:

• Engage with Humility - We actively participate with openness and receptiveness. We are ready to listen, learn, and speak thoughtfully and kindly—regardless of skill level, expertise, or place on the org chart.
• Invest in our team - We give our time and energy to our team’s success—improving collaboration with effective communication, making space for diverse perspectives, sharing knowledge, and asking questions.
• Do Our Best Work - We aspire to do our best possible work—continually looking for ways to improve the quality of our individual output and contribute to our team's overall success and growth.
• Focus on Customer Impact - We advocate for our customers' best interests in our decision-making. We can trace the goal of every project back to creating positive value for our customers.
• Think Holistically, Work Iteratively - We focus on taking practical steps towards our goals with an awareness of the broader context—thinking big, working small.

We believe the strongest teams comprise people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, and we are committed to cultivating that diversity here at Planning Center. We're building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do your best work. You'll join a company where your contributions are valued and your well-being matters.

During the hiring process, you’ll have a chance to interact with several team members. We strongly encourage you to bring questions to each stage of the interview process. You’re interviewing us as much as we’re interviewing you.

Due to the nature of this position, applications will be accepted until we fill this role. If applying, please note that we will do our best to move candidates through the interview process quickly, but we intend to hire the right person, which will likely take time. We appreciate your patience.

Below is an outline of our hiring process.

• Step One: Apply with a resume and cover letter. Your cover letter should speak directly to your interest in this position. We want to know how your experience has set you up for success in this role and why you want to join our team.
  
  (A word of caution for those using AI cover letters: When compared to the hundreds of other candidates who did the exact same thing, it becomes painfully obvious who took the AI first draft. If you're going to use these tools, we ask that you use them well. Give our recruiter something a bit more human to read.)
  

• Step Two: Initial blind screen with our recruiter to get to know one another and discuss work and culture.
• Step Three: An invitation to an online coding assessment to get a rough understanding of your skills.
• Step Four: Technical interview with a few engineers (We'll discuss your coding submission, work experience, methodologies, and ask lingering questions you have about us).
• Step Five: Team Interview with our Platform Team so each member can get to know you.
• Step Six: Pending all goes well, an offer will be extended.
  

* Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet ~60% of the criteria, women and those in underrepresented groups in tech, tend to apply only when they check every box. If you’re unsure if your experience qualifies strong competency, we’d still love to hear from you and see if you're a good fit!

1. Reside in the United States
2. Eligible to work in the United States (we are currently unable to offer employment to those with H-1B visas)
3. Be willing to travel four times each year to connect with the rest of the team (not during a pandemic)

We love our team. It’s one of the core pillars we work off of every day, which is why we take care of you as best we can. Here are a few highlights, but you can find all our benefits here.

Get paid: We pay in the top 10% of the New York City rates no matter where you live, contribute to your 401k, provide a charitable giving match of up to $2,000 a year, have a generous allowance for continued education, and offer a co-working stipend. The annual salary range for this position is $169,751 – $194,002.

Be healthy: Generous paid sick time and vacation time, $200 a month for physical fitness and mental health, 95% medical & 100% dental premium health coverage.

Get out: Paid Fridays off in the summer, every other Friday off the rest of the year, a month-long sabbatical every five years, one week off between Christmas & New Year, one week off a year to serve with a non-profit, and two weeks paid vacation a year increasing to three over time.