About Gruntwork
Meet the Grunts.
Yevgeniy ("Jim") Brikman
Co-founder
Jim is the author of two books published by O’Reilly Media: Hello, Startup and Terraform: Up & Running. He has more than a decade of experience building infrastructure and products that serve hundreds of millions of users at LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Cisco Systems, and Thomson Financial.
Josh Padnick
Co-founder and CEO
Josh is the author of the definitive 12,000+ word guide to building scalable web apps on AWS which garnered 500+ upvotes on Hacker News, has presented on AWS and DevOps at numerous conferences and meetups, and built apps on AWS for 100,000+ users. Previously, he founded Omedix (now Edaris Health), a healthcare IT company that served over 4,200 providers and 500,000 patient-users.
Monica Chun
Financial Planning Adviser
Monica has worked in Finance for 15+ years. Her career spans investment banking, corporate financial planning, and small business financial management. At Gruntwork, she oversees financial and accounting functions and works closely with management on financial strategy and planning. In addition to building sophisticated (but usable) financial models, she also enjoys travelling, volunteering in community organizations, and has recently taken up tennis.
Oreoluwa David Agunbiade
Software Engineer
Ore's desire to understand how electronics and computers work led to a university degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering and a brief career in Telecommunications. Prior to Gruntwork, Ore worked as a Full Stack web developer developing applications for making Internet services easily accessible and affordable in Nairobi, Kenya. Outside of work, Ore enjoys console gaming, basketball and soccer.
Marina Limeira
Software Engineer
Marina is a Brazilian software developer, currently living in Berlin and and now working as a Software Engineer at Gruntwork. She has worked across a variety of industries, including healthcare, marketing, finance, and car trading, and across the entire stack, including backend, frontend, DevOps, and testing. She loves functional programming in Clojure, travel, and video games.
Eben Eliason
Principal Product Designer
Eben is a UX designer with a passion for synthesizing form and function to create truly enjoyable experiences. With degrees in interactive media and computer science, he tackles any design problem from both creative and analytical perspectives. He's not afraid to get his hands dirty in code to play, prototype, or tweak a tiny detail until it's just right. Prior to Gruntwork, Eben served as Director of Design at Oblong, crafting next-gen collaborative conference rooms and apps to improve team communication by bringing in-person social cues to virtual meetings. He's also a hiker, boulderer, and board game enthusiast who dabbles in game design himself.
Ana Krivokapić
Principal Software Engineer
Ana is a software engineer with over a decade of experience mostly focused on backend and infrastructure. Prior to Gruntwork, she worked at Elastic (where, as an SRE, she helped keep the lights on the Elastic Cloud) and Red Hat (where she worked on the OpenStack project for over five years). Originally from Serbia, Ana has lived and worked in four countries and now calls Berlin home. In her free time, she likes traveling, reading, learning about all sorts of things (currently music/piano) and going on adventures with her partner and their dogs.
Ian Bowers
Sales Engineer
Ian is a Sales Engineer in Boston, Massachusetts with a DevOps background. Before working at Gruntwork, he was a Site Reliability Engineer at Podium and Venmo. Ian joined Gruntwork on a mission to make writing Terraform simple and enjoyable for all. When not writing code, Ian enjoys adventures outdoors, reading books, and playing his guitar.
Sarah Stewart
Senior Engineering Manager
Sarah’s career in technology has spanned several industries and over the past 20 years a variety of roles from full stack software developer to various leadership positions. Her greatest passion is for helping individuals, teams, and companies in the technology space to know their value and potential, and put it to greatest use. She is particularly excited about working on projects that make peoples’ lives better and has a special soft spot for making developers and leaders lives better.
Jason Griffin
Principal Product Manager
Jason is an engineer, leader and consultant with nearly 30 years of industry experience spanning sectors as diverse as satellite remote sensing and casino gaming. During this time he’s lived and worked on four continents, developing technology products for household names including TomTom, IKEA and Nike. Prior to Gruntwork, Jason led the product development and customer engineering for a Dutch startup that was acquired by CircleCI in 2021. In his free time, Jason is a keen street photographer and collector of analogue cameras.
Ryan Russell
Software Engineer
Ryan is a Software Engineer based in Sacramento, California. Before joining Gruntwork he spent several years in consulting delivering cloud and DevOps solutions to a wide range of companies. Ryan has a passion for technology, loves tinkering, and his spare time he enjoys working on smarthome projects, lighting projects, and cars.
Carlos Vitor Barros
Engineering Manager
Carlos Vítor (aka CV) is a Software Developer, Cloud Engineer and Release Engineer with 20+ years of expertise in automation, quality-driven practices, and software craftsmanship. Prior to Gruntwork, Carlos led the CI Reliability squad at Datadog, responsible for the high scale CI infrastructure enabling 2,000+ engineers. His mission is to empower developers, optimize product delivery cycles and maximizing developer efficiency. Outside of work, Carlos enjoys games, TV shows, road cycling and philosophy. He also cherishes spending quality time with friends and family.
Yousif Akbar
Principal Software Engineer
Yousif is a Software Engineer with experience building cheap, scalable and performant cloud systems. Prior to joining Gruntwork, Yousif was the lead DevOps Engineer for PBS KIDS, where he ensured that millions of kids across the US had reliable access to top quality, fun and educational content for free. Yousif is passionate about teaching, learning, and the elimination of toil. In his spare time, Yousif enjoys traveling with his wife, spending time with his dogs and playing games with friends.
Alyssa Knoll
Principal Product Manager
Alyssa is a product enthusiast who is always in search of the next puzzle to solve. With product management experience across a variety of industries, she’s built a passion for deconstructing complex problems, confidently navigating tough trade-offs, and delighting end users. Outside of work, she can be found frantically scribbling notes for her next tabletop campaign, or buried in several concurrent knitting projects. Often both.
Possibly You!
We're hiring! Check out Gruntwork Careers for the details.
Our Mission:
Make it 10x easier to understand, build, and deploy software.
We believe that software is one of the most important technologies in human history. We also believe that, as it is today, software is far too difficult to use, create, understand, and maintain. We want to live in a world where building and maintaining software is vastly more accessible than it is today and where the ability to create secure, scalable, and available software is not just the domain of a small number of elite companies.
We envision a world where software teams:
- Can build on top of the best infrastructure and tools available, rather than just those they have the time and budget for.
- Have access to clear training materials and real-world examples for any DevOps concept they may want to learn.
- Develop infrastructure, DevOps, and security practices as a large community, rather than a bunch of individual silos.
Most of all, we envision a world where software teams can spend far less time focused on infrastructure and far more time focused on the unique aspects of their businesses.
Our Values
Do the right thing.
You almost always know what's the right thing to do. It's the choice that is fair, ethical, and decent. It's the choice that lets you feel good as a human being. Always make that choice, even if it means losing a client or losing money. Be a good person.
Take pride in your craft.
Whether you write code, make sales calls, or work on legal documents, do it well. You could call it "attention to detail," "great taste," "craftsmanship" or, as Michael Feather's puts it, "Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares." Whatever you call it, always strive to do work you can be proud of.
Get things done.
The counterpart to pride in craftsmanship is finding a way to get things done. The most beautiful code that never ships or sits unfinished adds no value, no matter how beautifully it's crafted. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Incrementalism.
The best way to get things done is to do work incrementally. We believe that quantity of iteration beats quality of iteration. Plan projects so that every increment is valuable by itself. Optimize for fast feedback rather than trying to come up with a perfect plan. Aim to recover quickly rather than trying to avoid all mistakes.
Our Story
Gruntwork originally started out as two traditional DevOps consulting companies, Atomic Squirrel, founded by Jim and Phoenix DevOps, founded by Josh. Jim and Josh met in 2015, realized that they kept re-implementing the same solution with every client, and began working together to create a better way to create best-practices infrastructure.
In 2016, after working with a number of clients and building up a library of reusable scripts, templates, and best practices, they merged the two companies together into Gruntwork.
For the rest of the story, be sure to check out our blog post, How we built a distributed, self-funded, family-friendly, profitable startup.
Where we work
- Phoenix, AZ
- Dublin, Ireland
- Marlboro, NJ
- Fremont, CA
- London, England
- Orlando, FL
- New York, NY
- Boston, MA
- Woodbury, CT
- Berlin, Germany
- Calgary, Canada
- Chicago, Illinois
- San Francisco, CA
- Portland, OR