working at Altiscale - Senior DevOps Engineer Altiscale Employee Review

Big Data is hard, many here have the battle scars to prove it. We make it actually work, so customers like it. Existing customers keep signing up for more, especially the biggest ones. This is not a place with 10,000 customers and no revenue, and that's good. You get to work with a pretty amazing team of people. Work life is pretty flexible. People do work long (and sometimes weird) hours, but you don't have to be in the office, crammed in all the time. People have kids, a lot of guys leave early to pick up from day care, and then log on at night. It's not a big deal.

There are some spiky personalities here that you have to get used to. People can be so grokked on their thing that they don't communicate enough with other teams. Customers are great sometimes, a pain the others, it's sometimes tough to be the ops team to so many different people, some with a lot more Big Data experience than others.

Experienced management who have all done successful startups before. Management is fairly accessible, with a weekly all-hands meeting and a regular all-hands offsite. Great team of Hadoop engineers, operators and architects. If anyone can make Hadoop run smoothly, this team can. There are plenty of perks, including Friday lunches, flexible hours, unlimited vacation, and snacks/drinks. The company has many customers, and they seem to be happy. It seems most are increasing their purchases over time.

Altiscale is not immune to the typical challenges of a startup. Sales are not landing as fast as the company had hoped, which has led to a layoff. Management continues to work on the product mix, moving up-stack in an attempt to sell to the business versus IT, forcing us to develop product and land customers at the same time. It's a juggling act that makes it difficult for everyone in the company. These cons are real, but they are pretty typical of a startup.