platform.sh is a fully distributed startup creating a fully distributed Second Generation Platform as a Service. It is a spin-off of Commerce Guy an Open Source company that created Drupal Commerce, an ecommerce solution used by more than 65 thousand merchants.
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We are a fully distributed team, our headoffice is in Paris, but often there won't be more than 3/4 persons permanently there. Our CTO is bathing in the sun in southern France. Our sales director lives in a nice house south to London. One of the support guys lives in Cairo. There are a couple of people around Cologne. We have one guy in northern Canada. Brr must be cold there. Than there's Salt-Lake City and Ann-Arbor, Los Angeles and a couple of other cities both on the east and west coast. One guy, travels all the time, we never know where he is (last sighting was in Novi Sad I believe).
In aggregate we speak 20 languages (including English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Italian.. but also Chinese, Hebrew, Serbian, Greek and Latin). We do all team communications in English.
We do daily standups through Google Hangouts, and rely extensively on HipChat for team communication. Everything. Everything goes through a Jira ticket. Everything is in Git. Everything is in the cloud. We don't own servers.
Everything is done pull-style, nobody assigns stuff, we don't control working hours (although there are on-call schedules). So coordination overhead is minimal.
Every year get together in a beautiful mansion in the French country side. From time to time we make smaller gatherings in the Paris office (for architecture sessions or on-boarding new developers).
We participate in many international conferences (we encourage developers to submit sessions) which is another moment team members have the occasion to meet face to face. Which is very important.
From time to time people aggregate ad-hoc in a city (Cologne just became an office).
We offer internships, but those must be in the Paris office, we do not believe in the concept of remote internships.
Our main office is in Paris and we can help on relocation, but most people in the company work remotely. Currently we have people in north-america (where we have offices in Ann Arbor MI), Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle-East, but we hire on competency alone, not on time-zone affiliation.
- Python
- Go Lang
- Angular.js
- LXC/Zookeeper/Kafka/Riemann/Ceph/Influxdb