About us

We are Server Density
History

Story & culture

Server Density was founded out of frustration with the state of monitoring products that existed in 2009, which were either expensive and overly complex enterprise tools or open source products that become very time consuming to set up and maintain. Our founders were looking for a product that just worked, so they could focus on their core business. They couldn’t find one, so they decided to build their own. Server Density was born.

With almost a decade of experience of the challenges facing ops teams maintaining sophisticated, modern infrastructure, we started a community called HumanOps. We know from personal experience that on-call work takes a toll on the people who do it, and we wanted to make it better. HumanOps principles and our meetups around the world are designed to help both dev and ops teams balance the challenges of the job, and share ideas with each other.

Server Density is now monitoring tens of billions of metrics every day from over 700 customers worldwide. Whether you’re managing critical national infrastructure, a growing online retailer or beginning the startup journey, Server Density can help you become more proactive, and less reactive. From our London HQ and with team members working remotely from around Europe, our goal is to help you get a close as possible to the mythical 100% uptime.

SD team working in our London office
SD team at London science museum eating sweets!
Fiona, Hannah and Zara fun times
Work with us

Careers

Server Density combines both remote working and a physical office in Central London, Southbank (with flexibility to work from home). We’re a small team but have a big vision to help all our customers achieve 100% uptime! Everyone in the company makes a significant contribution towards that mission through doing challenging work with real customers. Why not join us?

What it's like working here

Flexible role

We hire people for, but not limited to, specific roles. This means means we hope you will think about how you can improve how we do what we do across the whole company. Of course, you will mainly be working on a specific job but we intend to hire based on the principle of “smart and gets things done”, which we hope you will apply broadly.

Engineering approach

We structure our work in development cycles that are 2-3 weeks long. The whole engineering department, as well as support and operations, are involved in the planning meeting for each cycle. Following a clearly defined process, these meetings take about 30 minutes. During a cycle, every developer individually chooses what they wish to work on from the list of available tasks. You will also have regular 1-1 meetings with your tech lead, the engineering manager and the CEO every few weeks. Every 2 months you will have a complete week to work on anything you want: we call this random week. Past projects have included re-writing parts of the codebase, replacing build tools, reading up on a particular topic, open-sourcing areas of the codebase and drawing new designs for our mascot.

On-call

We share on-call responsibility throughout the engineering team. After your onboarding, you will be on-call approximately every three weeks. For handling incidents out of hours, you will automatically get the next day off work. You can see how we handle on-call in more detail on our blog.

Engineering tools

The engineering department is fully remote, working from different parts of Europe. We use GitHub for source control and code reviews, Slack and Basecamp for written communication, Zoom for video chat, and JIRA to track bugs and programming tasks. As code reviews are central to our development process, we have described how we do them in detail on our blog.

Anonymized hiring

We anonymise most of our hiring process to try and remove all potential for bias and focus on hiring the best people.

Unlimited holiday

With tracked time off and active encouragement by your manager to ensure you take at least 28 days per year.

Conduct policies

We maintain policies around codes of conduct (including when selecting which open source projects we use), internal complaints and disciplinary procedures.

Equal paid maternity & paternity leave

Following UK government requirements but in addition, equalising rights for paternity leave.

Objective performance reviews

Based on the format in High Output Management by Andy Grove, twice per year with bonuses paid based on performance.

Company pension

With tax benefits for UK residents.

Company meetups

The whole company gets together twice per year so everyone can hang out and physically work together.

Conference allowance

We provide an annual conference allowance covering tickets and travel.

Security

We take security seriously and have strong policies around using 2FA, password managers, encryption and data retention.

Equipment preferences

Choice of computer (macOS or Linux), display and chair.

Policy changes RFC

Introduced through a “request for comments” process using Github Pull Requests to track discussion and amendment history.

Pedro, Operations lead, working hard
Daniele, resident designer, focused on the job
Our CEO getting in on the pizza action

A recent behind-the-scenes of our London office film by American Express