Come help fix the broken tech from the 80s that protect our data today.

Data privacy is so broken because systems to protect data are terrible. Companies are using technologies from the 80s (RBAC/VPNs) to protect our data. A company with 100 engineers has 50,000 RBAC policies to manage only for AWS EC2 service.

hoop.dev is a client to databases, AWS, Kubernetes, and others. Users access hoop.dev from Slack, CLIs, Web, IDEs, and others. We make accessing cloud resources easier than installing multiple clients and using VPNs. We leverage APIs and contextual data to make authorization decisions. By making security easy we fix data privacy.

The worst thing that can happen to an engineer is to get paged out-of-hours only to realize they can't fix the problem on their own. They did all the hard work of waking up, debugging the problem, and finding a solution. But when it's time to apply the fix, they don't have access. Time to call a DevOps engineer to get permission or have them run the patch.

DevOps means developers run their own code, but how can a developer operate a piece of software if she can't access the database, the cloud provider, or the Kubernetes cluster? Only a handful of people has access to these resources at most companies today.

This problem is not just bad on out-of-hour pages. DevOps teams centralizing raw access to production are bottlenecks to the whole engineering team. A simple query in the database to troubleshoot a problem can take hours for the busy and sad DevOps team to process the request in their queue.

It's not ok to keep making direct updates to the database or change things in the AWS console all the time. CI/CD and infrastructure as code are great tools. But direct access will happen no matter how much automation a company has. Restricting raw access to a few engineers results in bad culture incentives and an environment with low trust and autonomy.

hoop.dev democratize access to production to enable DevOps. We fix this problem by adding security and compliance into easy-to-use clients. hoop.dev enable any engineer to make production access with security and reliability.

How we work

• Our team is fully distributed
• We use async-first written communication
• We assume you are not at your computer
• We invest time on design to make sure the user experience is great
• We opt for simplicity for users at the cost of engineering complexity
• We reduce the number of decisions a user makes no matter how complex the system will end up
• We open-source the pieces of our system that could be useful to the community or bring transparency to how we do things

Boston (3-4 days/week in office) | Seed stage | Open source infrastructure

We're Hoop.dev - we built an open-source access gateway that sits between your team and your databases/servers. Think of it as a smart proxy that handles authentication, auditing, and data masking without the usual enterprise security theater.

Our users love it because it actually makes their lives easier instead of harder. We've got real traction and need someone technical to help us scale.

What we're looking for

A first sales engineer. Honestly, we're not sure if we want someone from sales who can learn technical stuff, or someone technical who wants to try sales. Probably the latter.

If you're a dev/DevOps person who's curious about the business side, this could be perfect. You'd be:

• Showing prospects how the product works (actual demos, not slides)
• Hanging out in our GitHub community
• Writing docs and technical content
• Figuring out what prospects actually need vs what they say they need
• Maybe speaking at conferences if you're into that

About you

You probably:

• Know your way around databases, k8s, or infrastructure generally
• Can explain technical concepts without making people's eyes glaze over
• Are curious about why companies buy things (or don't)

Sales experience not required. Being able to code is more important than knowing how to "always be closing" or whatever.

Why now

• First 20 employee at a company with real product-market fit signs
• Open source project with actual users who contribute back
• Work with smart people on hard infrastructure problems
• Learn business skills without sacrificing your technical growth

The boring stuff

Competitive salary + equity. 3-4 days/week in our Boston office, flexible on which days. We use the tools you'd expect. Health insurance. Learning budget for books/conferences/courses.

Apply

Include your GitHub if you have one. Tell us about something technical you built or a problem you solved. We care more about how you think than your resume formatting.

No cover letter template nonsense. Just be yourself.

hoop.dev is not a traditional SaaS app where everything happens through a web app. One of our main user interfaces are a CLI and a Slack app; and our main backed service is a self-hosted agent. We love Lisp. We believe it's a speed and quality hack. We use Lisp everywhere. The flavor we choose was Clojure(script).

Using Clojure for everything - from CLIs to Linux daemons - has drawbacks, and we are aware of them. One of the big benefits of this property is that anyone in the team can contribute to any piece of the system. However, we don't believe in full-stack engineers, our focus is to team up with great engineers with deep knowledge in one area, and that are open to learn other parts of the stack at hoop.dev. We understand that you won't get as deep as your main area, and this is fine.