prayerletters.com is the leading online platform for sending printed prayer letters. Working here gives you an unparalleled view of missions around the world, along with the opportunity to provide a much-appreciated service to missionaries.
We're looking to hire a combination programmer and IT person to build and improve our ministry communication services and associated infrastructure.
This is a half-time, remote position.
Responsibilities
As a programmer at prayerletters.com, you'll create, maintain, and improve software that helps missionaries grow and keep in touch with their support base, multiplying their time for ministry activities.
As an IT person at prayerletters.com, you'll deploy, automate, and monitor servers on our on-site and off-site clouds to ensure that our services are reliable, responsive, and secure.
Your contributions will help over a thousand missionaries be more effective as we help them stay focused on their field of ministry rather than being distracted by administrative and financial details.
Environment
prayerletters.com is a small business located in New Hampshire with four full-time employees. Steve, the founder, is a software developer with over 25 years of experience running online services (primarily this one).
Our goal is for this position to take on most of the programming and IT aspects of Steve's role so that he can focus on running the business as a whole.
The code that runs our services has been under continual, iterative development since 2003. We fix bugs as they appear and refactor/modernize existing code while we write new code. This, combined with extensive logging, decent testing, and automated deployment means that it's relatively stable and easy to maintain.
Our software runs primarily on Perl, Javascript, PostgreSQL, and Linux. Our IT infrastructure is currently powered by Ansible, Proxmox, AWS (primarily EC2, RDS, and S3), Jenkins, and Prometheus, among others.
Qualifications
We're looking for a programmer and IT person who is also passionate about helping missionaries be effective in their work.
We'll prefer a candidate with significant experience writing modern Perl, but will also consider candidates who have specialized in comparable languages and are willing and able to learn Perl quickly.
You should be a perfectionist with strong troubleshooting skills and a love for systems and automation.
You should have strong written English skills.
You should have some familiarity with most of the technologies listed in the previous section.
You should have prior experience working with at least one web framework in your preferred programming language.
Most work will be asynchronous, but your working schedule should overlap with daytime business hours in the US Eastern time zone at least twice a week for a couple of hours to allow for more rapid communication.
You are either located and have a legal right to work in the United States or you're located outside the United States and we can figure out how to pay you in a way that doesn't create an undue burden on our company.
We're unlikely to hire an entry-level candidate for a remote position. However, we will consider a strong candidate without relevant professional work experience who is willing to work on-site as an employee.
Terms of Employment
We expect this position to be structured for an hourly independent contractor and have budgeted for approximately 20 hours per week at a competitive rate for an experienced programmer. If you prefer, we are very open to an employee relationship, provided we can work out the legal details based on your location.
You may work from home or at a place of your choosing, including at our office if you happen to be local. If you don't live nearby, you will not need to be on site for any aspect of your role.
How to Apply
Send us a letter from the contact us page, including the following:
Why you are applying to work here.
Why you would be a good fit as a remote software developer and IT person.
A link to one or more web pages containing your résumé and examples of past work. Please include your CPAN ID if you have one.
An example of an excellent web site usability experience that you've had recently, along with what made it special.
What you would write as an error message to be presented to a user when our software crashes due to a bug.
How you would respond if it's Monday afternoon and our monitoring system has just alerted you that the public site is down.