CIO just released its 15 top cities for tech startups, and Seattle is at the heart of the list. In fact, CIO reported in 2012 that Seattle is home to twice as many startups as the national average.
“If you’re considering working for a tech startup or launching one of your own and need to know where the venture capital is flowing, one of these cities may soon be the place you call home.” –Rich Hein of CIO
While some in the industry rightfully talk about the risks associated with working at a startup, Skytap is in a unique position. We are more of a high growth, emerging company than a startup. So working here offers a bit more stability than a bootstrap venture. But at Skytap, we still embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of a startup company, and have created a fast moving, high impact work environment where everyone is in a position to excel.
In a 2012 article titled 10 Facts About Working for a Startup vs a Big Company, Alex Loddengaard talked about the benefits of working for a startup, which included:
Responsibility, Accountability, Impact: At a startup it’s unavoidable to have lots of responsibility and accountability. There’s no doubt, too, that being at a startup will put you in a position to make a huge impact. If you do amazing work the entire company and all of its customers will benefit from it. And you’ll be loved for it. You’ll get notes from the CEO and other leaders complimenting you on how awesome your work is. On the flip side, if you make a big mistake, the whole company pays for it. But keep in mind that most startup cultures prefer agility and speed to cautiousness. It’s likely that your mistake won’t actually get you in trouble, as long as you were trying to do the right thing.
Ownership and Leadership: At a big company you need to wait years and years to become a true leader with big ownership. Not at a startup. If you’re awesome you’ll be able to grow and move up in your career far faster. Mark Zuckerberg would have never been given a CEO role at a big company he started working for after college. The only way he could find himself at the top of an organization is by starting it, or in the general case by joining a super small team. Your career will be accelerated in a major way by joining a startup.
Company Culture: You get to help define it. A company will be, for the most part, an extension of the founders’ personalities. But especially in the early stages you’ll have a huge impact on the culture of the company as well. You’ll be in a position to define company-wide celebratory goals, or traditions that the team rallies behind. At the end of the day a startup is just a few people in a room. If you’re one of those people your personality will rub off on everyone else and you’ll help create a company that is as much a part of you as you are of the company.
Does this sound like the place for you?
There are opportunities to join our team in the following areas:
Senior Software Engineer – Platform As a member of our platform team, you will be implementing software to deliver scalable, highly available, and secure virtual data centers to our enterprise customers. We are looking for individuals with experience building complex distributed systems using agile development techniques.
Systems Engineer The Systems Engineer at Skytap is responsible for supporting Skytap customers in the adoption of the Skytap Cloud and its technologies. This is a critical role at Skytap, one that consists of both a post and pre-sales support. As a member of our platform team, you will be responsible in driving customer enablement, and in the creation of the necessary tools to facilitate customer success.
Senior Software Engineer – Networking We are looking for individuals with experience designing and developing complex network services. We use agile development techniques, and our service is built primarily on open source software and languages including Linux and Python. Experience with these technologies along with relational databases and scale-out architectures is preferred.
You can see all of our current openings on our careers page. And if you’d like to put yourself forward as a candidate for any of these positions, please email your cover letter and resume to jobs@skytap.com.
