Ghost careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Ghost is an open source publishing platform for independent journalists, writers and publishers who want to build subscription and membership businesses online. It was founded in April 2013 by John O'Nolan and Hannah Wolfe and is run as the Ghost Foundation, a nonprofit whose constitution bars it from ever being acquired, structured so the product stays accountable to users rather than shareholders. Ghost reports over 100 million installations, more than $11 million in annual recurring revenue and over 30,000 paying customers on Ghost(Pro), its hosted product.

The team has been fully remote since founding and is kept deliberately small, around 37 people spread across 5 continents, 16 nationalities and 15 languages, with the company saying it does not intend to grow much past 50. O'Nolan is CEO and Wolfe is CTO; both were part of the original distributed founding team, which O'Nolan has said is why remote hiring for Ghost was never really a decision, just a continuation of how the company started.

Ghost carries no venture-growth pressure. It was seeded by a 2013 Kickstarter that raised 196,362 pounds (about $350,000) in a few days, has never taken VC money since, and the company says it has been profitable every year since the beginning. That funds a genuinely calm operating rhythm: a 4-day, 32-hour work week at full salary with Fridays off year round, most staff report only one or two Zoom calls a week, and the company keeps calendars deliberately empty for focus work.

Pay is posted with every listing and reviewed annually against the market. Recent openings included a Support Operations Engineer at $90,000 to $130,000 and a Staff Product Engineer at $140,000 to $180,000. Benefits include a MacBook Pro plus a $500 workspace setup budget, co-working space stipends, a professional development budget, fully paid parental leave, a mandatory two-week December shutdown, and twice-yearly all-team retreats in places like Thailand, Dubai, Egypt, Austria and Spain.

It is also one of the few sizeable open source projects where the company itself ships the product: everything Ghost builds is released under the MIT license, so both the code and much of how the business is run are public.

Ghost describes itself on its own careers page as not a rocket ship, explicitly choosing a sustainable, profitable business over rapid growth, and says it looks for people who are low ego and high autonomy, comfortable working mostly async and in writing. Slack functions as the company's virtual office, combining work chat, social chat and notifications.

Remote work is not one fixed policy but set per role: recent engineering postings required working hours overlapping UTC-1 to UTC+3, while a recent support posting required UTC-5 to UTC+3, so the overlap band you need depends on the team you join rather than a single company-wide rule.

Both engineering and support roles run through an eight-stage process: application review, an informal call with the operations team, a technical call with the hiring manager, a further stage specific to the role (a pair-programming session with leadership for engineering, a call with a support team member for support roles), a paid trial project of roughly 15 hours, a review call on that trial, a final interview, then an offer.

Ghost says a real member of the team reviews every application personally, and it actively encourages applications from women and other underrepresented groups in tech.