The cloud made life convenient.
It also took our data
Why Umbrel, and why now?
- People want privacy, ownership and control over their data, and fewer subscriptions. - The cloud benefits from economies of scale mostly in compute sharing, not as much in storage. Storage in the cloud is rent forever (plus egress), while local storage is a one-time cost with zero egress and near-instant performance. - Legacy NAS companies assume you enjoy DDNS, ports, volumes, and acronyms. Most people don’t. There’s a big gap for a consumer-grade, app-focused, OS-level experience. - AI models keep getting smaller, smarter, and specialized. Running inference near your data is private, responsive, and cheap. A personal server is the natural home for that future.
What are the benefits of working at Umbrel?
- A decent chunk of equity w/ cash compensation. - Worldwide health insurance. - New work equipment + an Umbrel Home, of course. - Work from anywhere in the world. - Complete autonomy at work. - Learning and development stipend. - Flexible work hours. - Minimum 3-weeks of paid time off.
Have you raised money?
Yes, we raised $3.4M and are fortunate to be backed by some of the top Silicon Valley investors, including Naval Ravikant, Joseph Jacks (OSS Capital), Sahil Lavingia (shl.vc), Sam Lessin (Slow Ventures), Anne Dwane (Village Global), Andreas Antonopoulos, Owen Gunden, and more.
What’s the interview process like?
We’ll start with a quick 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, followed by a quick and fun challenge or a task. 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.
What's 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 a 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.