A new WebOps hire passed me an operations engineer's resume. I wrote the candidate directly.
The note was short. I said the referral described him as a solid operations engineer and that he might fit what we were trying to build for the company's next phase of growth. I asked whether he was interested in discussing the opportunity.
The source does not include the resume, an interview, or a hiring outcome. It documents the first contact and the reason I made it.
WebOps at Shutterstock covered the systems underneath a global ecommerce marketplace: compute, storage, networking, databases, deployment tools, monitoring, and incident response. The work also included building automation so application teams could provision infrastructure without waiting for an operator to perform every step by hand.
The company was growing quickly. During the first quarter of 2013, revenue increased 36 percent from the prior-year period to $51.1 million. Paid downloads increased to 22.3 million for the quarter. The collection exceeded 25 million images and one million video clips.
Growth at that rate created more than a capacity problem. The team needed enough people to operate existing systems, respond to failures, automate repeated work, and build the next version of the platform. Hiring an operations engineer meant looking for current technical ability and enough range to work across systems that were still changing.
The referral chain also mattered. A recently hired WebOps engineer sent someone he trusted. I contacted the candidate directly rather than routing the resume through a long recruiting sequence before a technical conversation.
This public skeleton leaves the candidate anonymous. A private recruiting email is evidence of my work, not permission to publish another person's employment history or evaluation. It also avoids claiming that the candidate joined Shutterstock.
For the archive, the useful record is the wording I used: “our next phase of growth.” By June, recruiting was part of the platform plan. The team needed more operators because the business, catalog, and infrastructure were all expanding together.