Jobs

Who we are

We're Best Practical Solutions, a small software company located in Somerville, MA. We build software and sell support, training, consulting, and custom development services. Our flagship product, RT (Request Tracker), is the premier open source issue tracking system. Our secondary product, Request Tracker for Incident Response (RTIR) is the leading open source incident handling system for computer security teams and is widely deployed across security, academic, and government agencies. We've been around since 2001 and are entirely self-funded.

We think Best Practical is an awesome place to work. Our jobs are enjoyable, challenging, and rewarding, with talented coworkers who know how to have fun.

Real-world problem solving

At Best Practical, we solve real-world problems with a system that is essential for our customers. For many of our customers, RT receives all of their support email, making it the first point of contact for their customers, and much of that customer contact comes in as email. We've seen some crazy samples of email from "the wild" and we need to make it work since RT can't drop a customer contact.

Internet ecosystem

RT sits in the middle of a complex stack of dependencies, many of them also open source, like Linux OSes, Apache, MySQL, Postgres, and a bunch of Perl code from CPAN. When you work at Best Practical, you learn about the entire internet ecosystem by troubleshooting OS issues, packaging systems, web servers, MTAs, databases (MySQL, Postgres, Oracle), and Perl code at the core of it. We're able to work closely with the groups that support many parts of this ecosystem and often solve issues with them to keep things running smoothly. Our work makes us experts in how the internet works, from web servers to email.

Open source

As an open-source solution deployed on customer sites, we're also challenged by heavily modified systems on all sorts of platforms. Customers like the fact that they can modify the RT source code, and we work closely with them to make sure these changes can co-exist with the standard RT distribution. The diversity of platforms, configurations, and customizations brings out the best CSI skills in our team as we work together to solve tough problems, often with limited information.

Being open source also allows us to work in the open on many of the features of RT. Our code is on github for everyone to see. When you work at BPS you're building your credentials as an open source programmer, not working on some small section of code locked away where no one will ever see it.

Community

Our clients are businesses, universities, governments, and organizations of all sizes, but RT is used by many more people than just our customers. The user and developer community is active and busy every day. We jump in and engage with our mailing lists and IRC channel, lending advice, triaging bugs, fielding pull requests, and hashing out desired features, all with people who want to make RT better.

A voice in the company

We're not afraid to speak up. Opportunities abound for every employee to voice their opinions which influence product decisions, future directions, and the beer in the fridge. Rather than dictate what must be done, we try to get everyone talking and collaborate on a solution.