Proton jobs, judged for you, free

What they do

Proton builds privacy tools. Scientists from CERN founded it in 2014. Its postings say it runs the largest encrypted email service, Proton Mail, and that it has added Proton VPN, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, Proton Calendar, Meet, and Lumo. Postings say the tools support over 100 million user accounts and help people avoid censorship and surveillance.

What they value

• Privacy as a fundamental human right, which every posting states in the first line.
• Independence. Postings say Proton is profitable and takes no venture capital.
• A small and highly selective team. Postings say Proton hires from about the top one per cent of applicants.
• Open source, which postings link to as proof of the work.
• A flat structure, which postings describe as light hierarchy and impact over optics.
• Adaptability, which postings name because the business is new territory.

Where they hire

Of 63 postings, Geneva holds the most at 23, then Paris with 20, London with 13, and Barcelona with 11. Smaller offices are in Skopje, Taipei, Vilnius, and Zurich. Many postings list two or three of these cities at once, so a candidate picks the office. Only one posting is remote, and it is in the United States.

Teams and roles

Product teams are named after the products, and the board is mostly engineering.

• Engineering by product: Drive holds seven postings, VPN holds six, Identity Manager holds four, Inbox holds three, and Neutron, Meet, and B2B hold the rest.
• Infrastructure: storage, platform site reliability, developer tooling, database, network, and service, one or two postings each.
• Security and anti-abuse: two postings in security, two in anti-abuse, and one in mail delivery and spam.
• Marketing and growth: four postings in performance marketing, plus growth roles for Inbox and VPN, a growth studio, social and community, and a head of growth.
• Product: product design, Inbox product, and VPN product, plus a head of product marketing.
• Business functions: single postings in sales, payments, customer support, accounts, finance and accounting, global procurement, and people and culture.

What they look for

Engineering postings name the stack plainly. The Android postings ask for extensive experience shipping Android applications in Kotlin, strong experience with Jetpack Compose, and end-to-end ownership of a feature from scoping through delivery. They also say the Android clients increasingly share a Rust core. The Rust engineer posting for Proton Drive asks for work on the Drive software development kits that all the client applications are built on, and for setting the technical roadmap on both the server and the client. Postings state that the company values intelligence, learning potential, and ambition in hiring. Non-engineering postings, such as the hardware buyer and the product marketing lead, keep the same opening about privacy and then describe the purpose of the role.