[Hiring] Migrations Engineer @Discourse

Salary depends on location and experience level, happy to provide range up front


About the company

Discourse is a global company with a product that is 100% open source. Our team is 100 people and growing. We’re transforming the online community space. Our product powers a substantial segment of successful online communities, with >30,000 Discourse instances globally. We have thousands of paying customers, with a growing number of Fortune 500 companies on our list, alongside many leading players in the fast-growth technology, gaming and AI spaces.

We're accepting applications from UTC-8 to UTC+2. Applicants in other timezones will not be considered (even if they are willing to adjust their working hours, we don’t think it’s healthy)

A Migrations Engineer on our team plays a vital role in helping our customers transition their forums and data smoothly to the Discourse platform. This position requires a blend of technical expertise (focused on development), project management skills, and excellent communication abilities.

Some days, you might be writing a custom migration script for an enterprise customer, handling complex data structures, and ensuring data integrity. On other days, you may be troubleshooting issues that arise during migrations, collaborating with customers to address their feedback, or enhancing our internal tools and documentation to improve the migration process.

At Discourse, we are primarily a hosting company, and the majority of your work will focus on migrations, supporting our customers throughout their transition to our platform, and assisting with customer-specific implementations.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Scoping and planning migration projects.
• Writing and running import scripts using our robust migration framework.
• Setting up migration environments in our Linux servers using Docker and different DB systems.
• Supporting customers via our public forums and our support inboxes.
• Reproducing bugs for our developers to fix.
• Handling day-to-day tasks managing customer sites on our infrastructure (e.g. instantiating sites, restoring backups, etc.).

We’re looking for someone who:

• Has a strong technical aptitude, with experience in Ruby or a similar language, writing SQL queries for MySQL/Postgres, composing regular expressions, and working on remote Linux servers (Debian-based) via the command line.
• Is skilled in writing custom scripts and handling various data structures and formats.
• Is customer-focused, exhibiting great customer service skills like responsiveness, follow-through, and empathy toward customer needs.
• Possesses excellent communication skills, able to convey technical concepts clearly and collaborate effectively with the team.
• Has strong knowledge of Discourse, including proficient use of the Discourse admin interface and comfort with digging into logs and technical details to troubleshoot issues.
• Shows initiative by proactively identifying areas for improvement and contributing to team efficiency.
• Since migrations are detail-intensive, you should be someone who looks to get the little things correct and follows up on loose ends.
• Can manage multiple projects, keeping several tasks in motion at once and prioritizing effectively.
• You’re not afraid to ask for help or escalate a task if you find yourself stuck, but you take the time to learn so that you can perform the same task yourself if it comes up again.

Bonus points if you’ve:

• Contributed to the Discourse community by submitting quality pull requests, building custom plugins, performing migrations, or participating in our public forum.
• Experience with various forum platforms like IP Board, Drupal, vBulletin, Khoros, etc.
• Participated in open-source projects or collaborated on community initiatives.
• Project management experience, demonstrating the ability to lead technical projects and collaborate closely with cross-functional teams.

At Discourse, the ability to communicate well in writing is paramount. We use our own software, Discourse, for most communication and most of your interaction with customers and team members will be in writing. In order to live these values, we look for folks who are:

• Detail-oriented, proactive, and organized.
• Able to make decisions quickly and communicate effectively.
• Work well independently and remotely.
• Kind to their co-workers.
• Highly driven with an execution focus and a strong belief in our mission to make the internet a better place.

If you are passionate about helping customers transition to a platform they love, enjoy solving complex technical challenges, and are eager to contribute to a collaborative team, we’d love to hear from you!

About our Pay & Benefits

We believe that high-quality benefits make our team more effective. We’ve been thoughtful about our benefits package which includes a completely flexible schedule, 5 weeks of vacation per year, funding for a co-working stipend, and much more!

Our Salary Framework is location and experience based and we’re happy to provide a range up front. We also give every employee a stake in the success of the business, regardless of seniority or role. All full-time employees are eligible to receive equity options in the company as part of our equity incentive program.

How to apply

Lastly, we believe in having a welcoming workplace where people with diverse backgrounds and cultures can create something great together. We encourage you to apply, even if you don’t meet every qualification! Apply by sending an intro to who you are and resume to [email protected].