Bitnami

The Bitnami Story

The goal of Bitnami is to bring awesome software to everyone. We love open source and were early adopters and contributors to projects such as Linux, Mono and Apache. One of our biggest frustrations has always been to see crappy software being adopted because its open source counterparts were considered too difficult to install or configure, even if they were more flexible and technically superior.

We started creating a cross-platform installation tool and quickly gained dozens of customers, including many of the leading open source companies such as MySQL, SugarCRM and Alfresco. In 2008 we launched Bitnami as an experiment to give back to the community, providing free one-click installers for common server side software such as WordPress, Drupal and development stacks such as LAMP and Ruby on Rails. The site quickly gained in popularity and we added support for new applications and platforms, including virtual machines and cloud images.

We knew we were onto something when we did our first user survey. Thousands of people took the time to write to us and the word more frequently used to describe Bitnami was 'awesome.' This left us scratching our heads a little, since people usually talk like that about their iPhone or a music concert, but not about server software. It turns out that we were solving a huge problem for our users, many of whom had experienced immense frustration trying to get something up and running in their machine. After hours or days of failed attempts, they had found their way to Bitnami and we solved their problem in literally a few minutes.

We decided to focus all of our efforts on Bitnami and re-built the company entirely around it, launching our first commercial offering in 2011: Bitnami Cloud Hosting. Today we have over a hundred applications in our catalog, with over one million new deployments each month. Our customers range from students and indie videogame developers to governments and large corporations, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, VMware, Oracle, Uber and Twitter.

What’s next for Bitnami? We are just getting started. Our goal is to make Bitnami the standard deployment platform for server software. You will be part of building the next generation of our platform, adding support for Docker, thousands of apps and tens of millions of users.

Who we are

Our values are a reflection of our experience. We are veterans of the first bubble and we saw first-hand the importance of solid business models and engineering principles. While we enjoy nice office perks like catered lunches, “Waffle Wednesdays,” and a fully-stocked beer fridge (half our team are Brits, they know their stuff...), you will not find the sense of entitlement or gimmicks that plague other startups.

We have engineering-heavy DNA, including the people running our sales, partnerships, and products. You definitely won’t roll your eyes at management because they “don’t get it.”

We love building and shipping software, helping others, and appreciate the effort involved in (and the upside of) solid engineering practices.

We are hard-working, intellectually curious, and enjoy an environment where we continuously learn from each other. Half of our team is in Europe (UK, Spain, and Poland) and half is in the US, so that means we get a fresh perspective on things and not just the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid.

We understand the value that VC money can bring in accelerating growth, but we have seen some of the downsides as well. We are lucky to be that combination of a profitable, high-growth bootstrapped company and thus your stock grant will mean something more than in the average VC-funded company.

We find it tremendously rewarding that our software is useful to users and lets them do things they couldn’t before. Be prepared to receive random hugs from strangers when you are wearing a Bitnami T-shirt (true story)!

How we hire

We try to make interviewing as quick and painless as possible.

We start with a 30-minute phone call with our Director of Engineering to introduce ourselves and answer any questions you have.

After this, we’ll send you an assignment to work on. We know you’re busy but it shouldn’t take more than a few hours. We think this is a great way for you to show us your technical chops.

After we’ve assessed your assignment, we'll invite you to our office in SF to meet with our founders and each member of our San Francisco-based engineering team. You'll have lunch with us and meet the non-engineering folks as well. We’ll also talk through your assignment. We’ve found this to be a good way to see first-hand what working with our engineers is like. By the end of the day, you should have a good feel for the company, the culture, and what makes Bitnami a great place to work. We try to extend formal offers within 48 hours of your visit. As part of this offer process, we will ask you to provide references of your former manager(s).