Love RT? Want to work on it full time? Best Practical is hiring!

About the Position
We’re looking for a Software Engineer who is creative and collaborative to help us improve RT. We’re an engineering organization first and foremost: every engineer has a large impact on the future of our products and business.

This role involves all aspects of software engineering: implementing new features, testing and reviewing branches created by co-workers and even community contributors, building customer sponsored features, documentation, improving performance, and responsibly addressing security vulnerabilities. RT is a mature codebase that sits right in the middle of the technologies underlying the internet (web, email, databases, encryption, etc). As such, our work gives you a deep understanding of the guts of how the internet actually works.

It’s okay if you don’t know everything out of the gate, but you should be able to learn on the fly, and be comfortable asking questions when you get in too deep. RT is a large codebase, so you should be prepared to work with a project that’s too big to hold in your head all at once.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (or related field) or 5+ years equivalent practical experience
  • Good understanding of web technologies, ideally Perl, JavaScript, and SQL
  • Experience working in a team, perhaps as part of other open source projects
  • Some Linux system administration, at least enough to be able to install RT
  • Being comfortable diagnosing and solving technical problems with customers over email for both projects and support
  • An eye for design is a big plus

About Us
Best Practical Solutions are the team behind Request Tracker (RT), one of the most popular open source ticketing systems in the world. RT, and its companion application, Request Tracker for Incident Response (RTIR), are used by organizations large and small, across all industries including: private and public companies, security teams, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profits. We’re been around since 2001 and are entirely self-funded. We are both contributors to, and beneficiaries of, the free software ecosystem; you can find all of our code on GitHub (Best Practical Solutions · GitHub).

RT, being free software itself, is absolutely free to download, deploy, and even modify. We’ve built a business around providing a full range of services to help our customers get the most out of RT. We offer commercial enterprise support, professional installation and upgrades, and custom development where we bring our expertise to address an organization’s specific set of challenges. All of our engagements, whether sponsored by a customer or done for our community, provide the satisfaction of knowing we’re helping people solve real problems every day.

We are based in Boston, MA, but we’re a completely remote company. We coordinate using RT (of course), Slack, and Zoom, and we try to get everyone together at least once a year for in-person planning and discussion. Benefits for employees include healthcare and dental coverage, as well as an open vacation policy.

When working at BPS, you can also count on endless opportunities for career growth. With RT’s large codebase, overall breadth of use cases, and variety of services we offer, you will have many opportunities to expand your skill set. In addition to writing code, we also help our customers with a full range of business process support including configuring RT, setting up workflows, and making RT better for people. Not to mention, because everything we do is open source, all of your contributions will be, too.

Interested? Drop us a line at resumes@bestpractical.com. Whether you’re involved in open source development, putting together some personal hobby projects, or making your mark on the world through your career, we would love to hear all about what you’re excited to be working on.

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