I looked up the founder's email address.
Craigslist replies had been hit or miss for me, and I wanted to make sure my application for a half-time Linux administrator job reached an actual person. I apologized for the lookup in the first sentence and sent the note to both addresses.
The pitch was not subtle.
I had more than nine years in systems administration, lived on the Lower East Side, and was running technical operations for a New York startup. I described work across Linux distributions, networks, storage, databases, web applications, and data centers. My current systems ran in Amazon, including EC2, EBS, S3, monitoring, deployment, and some early VPN work using IPsec and BGP.
Peek had recently shifted my schedule, which left time for another project. The listed monthly rate was fine with me.
“You can get a highly experienced individual at a bargain price,” I wrote.
I also asked for a one-line rejection if the role was already filled so I could stop stalking my inbox.
The founder replied two minutes later. He said they were further along with other candidates but would keep me in mind. A separate person from the company picked the thread up that afternoon and invited me into the interview process.
At six that evening, they sent a ninety-minute technical test. It covered error counting, standardized machine images, automatic application deployment, and copying a Java file to a cluster before restarting Tomcat.
I worked fast enough that I offered to write a different solution for the last question. I wanted the example to show what I actually did in current systems, not only meet the minimum prompt.
The next day brought a phone screen and an invitation to meet the team in person.
I had moved to New York for one job, switched to another within weeks, and was already looking for more work around it.
The direct email worked.