In the past few months, Proton Mail has grown tremendously through the support of our community. Your donations both during and after our crowdfunding campaign have allowed us to bring privacy to hundreds of thousands of people around the world for free.
With this support, we’re now ready to take the next step towards bringing privacy to everyone by growing our tech and support teams. As usual, we will be adding staff to our Geneva, Switzerland office, but for the first time ever, we will also be hiring in San Francisco, California.
Proton Mail’s MIT and Harvard team members will be relocating to San Francisco to work full time on Proton Mail. From the very beginning, we have always received strong support from the community in the Bay Area which is also home to many prominent organizations leading the fight for online privacy such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation(new window).
As we have learned in the past few months, running a fast growing email service is a 24/7 job and having staff in San Francisco gives us a bigger time zone spread that will make it easier for us to be responsive 24 hours a day, ultimately leading to a more secure and reliable service.
Today, over half of our web traffic is from the United States which goes to show how necessary privacy is in the US. By adding customer support staff in San Francisco, we will be able to better service a large portion of our user base.
We hope to do more than customer service in San Francisco however. The US is home to some of the world’s most talented designers and developers (not to mention the birthplace of Edward Snowden) so we are also actively looking for SF based designers and developers to help us improve the open source components of Proton Mail (which includes the front end and mobile apps currently under development).
A full listing of our open positions can be found on our jobs page:
Join us: careers.proton.me(new window)
A number of people have asked us why we would consider doing software development work in the US given the lack of strong privacy laws. From the very beginning, our philosophy has been to not consider geography when it comes to hiring. In fact today, Proton Mail is built with the help of security contributors and designers from places as diverse as Sudan and Vietnam. We believe privacy requires global participation, and we’re looking for the most talented developers who care about privacy, regardless of where they are from.
From a legal standpoint, all customer data, our corporate entity and administration will still be headquartered in Switzerland under the protection of Swiss privacy laws. Because we do client-side cryptography (data is encrypted before it reaches our servers and we have no way to decrypt), it actually does not matter where we host our encrypted data. However, since our team is originally from CERN and based in Geneva, we will continue to build infrastructure entirely in Switzerland.
If you are interested in helping make privacy the new default online and joining our team of scientists and privacy advocates, we look forward to hearing from you at careers@proton.me.
