Gruntwork

About Gruntwork

Gruntwork is a bootstrapped, fully remote company on a mission to make it 10x easier to deliver software. Founded in 2016 by Yevgeniy Brikman (author of Terraform: Up & Running) and Josh Padnick, the company emerged when two DevOps consulting firms realized they were repeatedly implementing identical infrastructure solutions for clients—and decided to productize those patterns into reusable, battle-tested modules.

What They Build

Gruntwork provides the definitive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platform for teams running on AWS. Their product suite includes:

• IaC Library: 300+ production-grade Terraform/OpenTofu modules implementing AWS best practices
• Pipelines: Automated infrastructure deployment with built-in compliance
• Patcher: Keep infrastructure code up-to-date with zero-downtime upgrades
• Account Factory: Spin up new AWS accounts with security baselines pre-configured

They also maintain two widely-adopted open source tools: Terragrunt (IaC orchestration at scale) and Terratest (automated infrastructure testing in Go).

Remote Culture & Philosophy

Gruntwork operates as a 100% distributed team with no offices—employees work from wherever they're most productive. The company is intentionally bootstrapped with no outside investors, which means no pressure to sacrifice employee wellbeing for growth metrics.

Their compensation philosophy is radically transparent: salaries and equity grants are computed using formulas based on role, level, and tenure—eliminating negotiation bias. Profit-sharing bonuses are distributed annually, and the company shares full financials with all employees monthly.

The team practices what they call a "human-first" approach: reasonable 40-hour weeks, required minimum vacation (4 weeks + 2-week winter shutdown), and meetings clustered on Monday/Wednesday/Friday to protect deep work time.

Who They Serve

Gruntwork works with companies ranging from startups to enterprises who need production-grade AWS infrastructure without building everything from scratch. Their IaC modules encode years of consulting expertise—the kind of hard-won knowledge that typically requires hiring expensive DevOps specialists or learning through costly mistakes.