Ameelio

Devops Engineer

Full-Time in New York City, NY - Remote OK

Ameelio has quickly established itself as the future of prison communication and virtual learning. We were recently chosen as one of Fast Company’s 2021 World-Changing Ideas and received a New York Times Good Tech Award.

As we prepare to scale, we’re searching for an infrastructure software engineer (3+ years of experience) with strong infra (Kubernetes, Docker, Microservice Architecture), and backend engineering experience (we use Elixir and Node.js/Typescript). Experience working with WebRTC, either directly or with libraries that use it, is highly desirable, but not mandatory.

A few focus areas today we could use a hand with

  • Monitoring — help develop our monitoring system end-to-end, ensuring we have robust monitoring, alerting, and tools for development/debugging
  • Release Engineering — owning everything from our git workflow, code review process, build system, configuration system, artifact management, CI/CD system, working hand in hand with engineers across the company
  • Core Deployment — managing our deployment in a way that allows us to be both extremely reliable and easily able to push new versions of the product. We deploy and run our applications on Kubernetes
  • Security — maintain and enhance our security practices across the ecosystem.
  • Infrastructure as Code: - Write terraform and Ansible script automate the provisioning of infrastructure

Who We're Looking For

  • 3+ years of experience.
  • You have a strong focus on delivering value as fast as possible to our core users.
  • You’re pragmatic in knowing when to refactor and when to ship.
  • You're able to ruthlessly prioritize in a chaotic and ambiguous environment.
  • You ship incrementally to move fast and can communicate how the team needs to handle product transitions.
  • You’re scrappy. We have to out-compete heavily funded for-profit competitors.
  • You can navigate and extend APIs and microservices
  • You have experience with Kubernetes in production.

Bonus Points

  • Experience working on a large scale group video calling platform like Zoom or Google Meet
  • Experience working with WebRTC, either directly or with libraries that use it

Why You'll Love Us

  • A welcoming and collaborative environment with people who are dedicating their lives to fighting the commercialization of incarceration
  • Experience working closely with users who rely on our product to stay in touch with their loved one
  • An environment for rapid experimentation and ownership
  • Ownership of entire systems and features that deliver society-changing impact
  • Contributing to the foundation and culture of a young and growing organization
  • Experience working cross-functionally and exposure to a variety of business functions
  • An incredibly high bar for velocity of shipping and the quality of your work
  • Compensation: $90,000 - $150,000
  • Desired: Appreciation for design and willingness to help advance a higher bar for design

About Ameelio

Ameelio is a nonprofit technology company that builds free technology to accelerate the creation of a more humane and rehabilitative justice system. We were recently chosen as one of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas. Our tools will enable 27 million Americans to communicate with their incarcerated loved ones for free, organizations to scale their social services, and educators to empower incarcerated people through virtual learning. We are a technological bridge that reconnects incarcerated people with their families and vital resources — for free. Our tools will help improve post-release outcomes, lower recidivism rates, and help America safely reduce the size of its prison populations.

We’re backed by Schmidt Futures, Mozilla Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, Google.org, and Fast Forward accelerator. Our funders also include Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square, and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Our work has been covered by Forbes, TechCrunch, Fast Company, The Washington Post, Business Insider, and others.

Company History

Ameelio was an all-volunteer effort until late-2020. Since, we've built an A-team that brings together technical and criminal justice expertise, participated in Mozilla's Spring MVP Lab (won 1st place), Fast Forward Accelerator, Robin Hood BRL program, and Visible Connect's Accelerator. We’re backed by Schmidt Futures, Mozilla Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, Google.org, and Fast Forward accelerator. Our funders also include Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square, and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures.

External References:

Problem We're Solving

The $1.4 billion prison communications industry generates obscene profits by charging extortionate prices to the incarcerated and their loved ones. Families spend up to $500 a month to stay connected to their loved ones inside. A 15-minute phone call runs as steep as $25. Our work has never been more important. Because of COVID, prisons have shut down all in-person visitation. Low-income families have few options to communicate with loved ones.

Exclusive contracts leave prison telecommunications companies unchecked by competition: former FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn called the industry “the clearest, most glaring type of market failure I’ve ever seen as a regulator”.

Poverty and incarceration are viciously tied: over 50% of incarcerated people had no income eight years preceding their arrest. For-profit prison companies entrench this cycle. One in three families with incarcerated loved ones is forced into debt ( $13,000, on average) by the cost of maintaining contact.

This is a social and moral disaster.

The Solution

A suite of free prison communications and virtual learning tools that connect the incarcerated with their loved ones, service networks, and colleges, which will improve post-release outcomes.

Connect: Video Conferencing, eMessaging, Voice Calls

Reconnecting the incarcerated with their loved ones and supporting the next generation of remote prison programming.

Learn: Virtual Learning

Enabling the incarcerated to access a wealth of digital educational resources, earn college degrees, trade certifications, and chart their own path to successful reentry.

Letters for Families

App that bypasses the absurdly high cost of making phone calls to prison by converting texts, photos, games & news to snail mail. We currently have over 3500,000 users in all 50 U.S. states, and in 42 countries.

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