Interested in joining Umbrel?

At Umbrel, we believe that everyone should be able to enjoy the convenience and benefits of the cloud, without giving up the ownership and control of their data.

To achieve our vision, we're building a new kind of operating system for running a personal server. So instead of paying ransoms for storing your own data on someone else's computer and having it auctioned off to advertisers — you could easily spin up your own server and self-host all of your data and services yourself. Just like the cloud, but one that you own and control.

The personal computer revolution shifted computing from rooms full of computers (mainframes) to personal computers. The personal server revolution will shift computing from rooms full of servers (data centers) to personal servers.

We believe that over this decade, personal servers will become as ubiquitous as the internet routers today. And our goal is to power this shift by making an incredibly simple yet powerful operating system for running them.

Rebuilding the third generation of the internet from the ground up with first principles is no small task. It’s challenging, but fulfilling. Our most important work lies ahead of us, and you can be a part of it.

You can read more about our vision and our story here.

If you join us, you’ll be among the first ten team members and your work will have a direct impact on shaping Umbrel’s future.

What are some of the benefits of working at Umbrel?

• 🚑 Health insurance
• 💻 New work equipment
• 🌎 Work from anywhere in the world
• 💆‍♀️ Complete autonomy at work
• 📚 Learning and development stipend
• 🕰 Flexible work hours
• 🪑 Budget for home-office setup
• 🏝 Minimum 2-weeks of paid time off
• ❤️ Most importantly — doing meaningful work that can change the world

What do you value at Umbrel?

• Making users happy: Our decisions, intention, results, and motivation stem from trying to delight our users — from shitposting memes on Twitter to obsessing over micro-interactions in our product.
• Asynchronous communication: Deep work requires large chunks of time so we try to communicate asynchronously to provide more time for deep work.
• Results driven: We do what we promised each other, our users, community, and investors. While effort is recognized, it’s not regarded equally. We care about what we achieve.
• Kindness: While being kind may not seem ruthlessly connected to outcomes, it does make work a lot more fun. We suspect that’s key to doing great work over a long period of time.
• Speed: We believe speed is a competitive advantage as a startup. As startups get larger, they tend to get slower—we hope to decelerate that as much as possible. You should always be asking: “Could we do this faster?”

Have you raised any money?

Yes, we raised $3m in our recent round. We’re fortunate to be backed by some of the world’s best investors, including Naval Ravikant, Joseph Jacks (OSS Capital), Sahil Lavingia (shl.vc), Sam Lessin (Slow Ventures), Anne Dwane (Village Global), Andreas Antonopoulos, Owen Gunden, Max Webster, Stephen Cole, and more.

What’s the interview process like?

We’ll start with a quick 45-minute video call to make sure we’re on the same page. After that, we’d love to chat with you in-depth regarding the specifics around the job position over another one or two video calls.

Next, our preferred situation is that we get to work together for 2 to 4 weeks on a project (of course, we’d pay you whatever you think is fair). Often working together for a bit is a great way to determine whether there’s a good match as future teammates and it can give you a lot of transparency.

We’re flexible with how much time you can allocate to the project and when you want to work on it. However, we understand that it’s not always possible for everyone, so we’re open to figuring something else out in such case.

What are you looking for in candidates?

Talent, passion, genuine love for your craft, and the desire to do meaningful work. What we’re not looking for: credentials and degrees. When you really love what you do, work feels like play. And when work feels like play, you become the best at it. That’s what we’re looking for.

Where is Umbrel located?

Our headquarters are on the internet, we do not have any physical office anywhere. We’re a fully remote team spread across the world, and there’s no bias towards a particular timezone or geographical coordinates.

Are you open to bringing on interns for any of your roles?

Not at this time—unfortunately, we don’t have the bandwidth necessary to offer a stellar internship program, but we may reconsider this in the future. We need to invest every ounce of our energy into making a great product right now.

What’s the technical stack that you’re working on?

~90% of our source code is written in JavaScript (Vue.js on the frontend, Node.js on the backend), ~8% is in Shell, and the remaining ~2% is in Python. We leverage Docker and docker-compose heavily in Umbrel (primarily for our app framework). You can view our source code on our GitHub (we'll migrate to a monorepo soon):

• getumbrel/umbrel: Master repository which orchestrates and run all the system services and app containers
• getumbrel/umbrel-dashboard: Web-based UI, written in Vue.js.
• getumbrel/umbrel-manager: System API, written in Node.js

What stage is the product at?

Umbrel is currently in beta (0.5.1) with thousands of users and 60+ self-hosted apps in the Umbrel App Store (as of September 2022). We launched on August 16, 2020 and have gained significant traction since.

Umbrel is no longer in the 0 to 1 phase of product building. We have more confidence that users want to self-host as much of their data locally as possible, and developers of self-hosted apps want access to seamless distribution of their apps.

What is work/life balance like at Umbrel?

All of us enjoy complete freedom to create our own work schedules and work from anywhere in the world. Most of our team communication is async. You wont find endless Zoom calls or full calendars here. Just a calm, creative group of humans enjoying challenging problems at the intersection of art and technology.

As a result of being an early-stage startup, we wouldn’t want to hide this reality from you: raw hours make a big difference on the impact we can make right now. This won’t always be the case, but it is at present. So we often find ourselves working later on in the evenings and sometimes on weekends, but it’s mostly driven by personal ambition. We don’t have any expectations from anyone to do so.