Rapid7

Nice office in a good location.

New powerful laptop (MacBook Pro) provided from day one.

Access to some modern internal systems and tools.

Cool office manager and local IT guy.

I joined Threat Intelligence as a senior DevOps engineer with more than 15 years of experience in the field, hoping that after leaving behind a big, over-regulated financial corporation, this would be a fresh start with lots of cool technologies while avoiding an over-regulated environment.

First things first, the company is not doing well. In the last year, it lost over 80% of its market value (check $RPD on NASDAQ), and unfortunately, this is reflected in its workforce, the state of the infrastructure and causing various consequences. My work was basically to tackle massive technical debt in a team of two, endlessly trying to upgrade years-old infrastructure and address very basic security flaws while falling into dependency hell. Except for a single service I built during my second month, I didn't deliver anything new, as the focus was purely on somehow fixing existing stuff. Tickets started flowing from the very first week and they even tried to micro-manage me (yes, our DevOps team of two has its own team leader).

As there is a high turnover in Prague and the company is almost exclusively focused on product delivery, the Cloud/Kubernetes technical debt is enormous, and I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel. During hiring, I've been promised to get RSU (in written form by HR recruiter), which company cancelled prior I joined without further notice, therefore I become the only one in my new team without such benefit, which I realized shortly after I joined. Rapid7 is not a bad company on its own, but the current market situation has put high pressure on existing staff, and currently, I would not recommend it. Good luck, moose.

Underinvested infrastructure and a shortage of DevOps engineers in the TI team will lead to an unsustainable accumulation of technical debt. This makes the environment fragile and creates a backlog of 'legacy' tasks that no senior engineer will want to touch.

Focus on retention and technical health, not just product delivery.