About Us:
- We have a flat no bosses structure where we value freedom and dissent
- We work where and when we want. We work remotely, but we have
offices in London, Berlin and Bilbao where you can base yourself from if
you want.
- We practise radical transparency in how we work – especially in decision-making
What’s that mean?
Ideals are cheap to talk about! We try to turn what we believe into
practical actions we can all follow and see happening around us.
- Fully supported remote working
- All information including financial and decision-making is shared to all employees
- We use shared messaging tools, not email
- We don't track holiday or working hours
- We value dissent – people choose what to work on and how to accomplish a task
- We rely on peer pressure and persuasion not authority
Who are we looking for?
You need to be the kind of person who finds the idea of
responsibility and radical means of working exciting rather than
terrifying. You are interested in picking up and mastering new
technologies and are keen to learn as much as possible. You need to be
prepared to ask challenging questions of yourself and others (why are we
doing it this way? Why are we doing it at all? If I can prove this is
easier, will you folks try it this way?). You should have a highly
developed sense of collaboration – doesn’t mean you need to be a
touchy-feely extrovert, but that you know sharing information, ideas and
support is essential to commercial success.
What’s the role?
This role is Operational in nature, but with a DevOps bias, and has
plenty of interest and scope. You'll be creating and designing new
infrastructure to meet our growing demands, and improving our existing
operational infrastructure. This will involve provisioning IT systems in
both Cloud and Hosted (hybrid) environments, using automated
provisioning and configuration management tools.
You will be responsible for all aspects of the operational systems
including availability, reliability, performance, monitoring and
security. Additional responsibilities include overall health monitoring
and regular systems maintenance tasks, making use of automation wherever
possible. We have high standards for our computer systems as well as
our employees: our systems are secure, reliable, and available, and must
function at scale; our employees are super smart, driven to serve
customers, and fun to work with.
Required Technical Skills:
With a DevOps bias, you will be able to show experience in the following areas:
• Linux Systems Administration skills and experience. We primarily use Debian, but there's some CentOS too.
• A solid grasp of networking fundamentals, preferably including
hands-on experience with load balancers, switches, routers, etc.
• Experience running and maintaining a 24x7 internet-oriented
production environment. Experience supporting “bare metal” hardware and
physical servers as well as cloud - the majority of our server estate is
cloud based, but there are some physical machines too.
• Demonstrable expertise around specifying, designing, and/or
implementing system health, performance monitoring tools. We currently
use New Relic, Datadog, Elastic Search / Logstash / Kibana, PagerDuty.
• Experience in managing provisioning and configuring servers using
configuration management tools such as CloudFormation, Terraform,
Ansible, SaltStack, Helm.
• Experience in database installation, configuration and management.
Note: we are not looking for people who have specific database
administrator experience, though it will obviously be beneficial if you
do have those skills. Currently, we have a mixture of Postgres, MySQL,
AWS RDS and Redis. Postgres and MySQL are the two main database systems.
• Some experience in containerisation with Docker / Kubernetes would be beneficial.
The real thing that matters though is that whether you have direct
experience or not, you have a willingness to learn and a hunger to
improve yourself and the systems. We often employ people who don't have
the EXACT experience, as long as they can show they know how to master a
topic or experience at speed.
What’s great about it?
- Exceptional freedom
- Work on the things you care about
- Have incredibly hard-working and committed colleagues
- When something doesn’t happen then you have the right and the responsibility to change that – which is exciting.
What’s bad about it?
- You can't blame stuff on managers or budgets or the company.
- Freedom isn’t always fun – sometimes it's scary.
- Having hard-working, committed colleagues means you feel the need to live up to them.