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 learning 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 are prepared to share information,
ideas and support.
What’s the role?
This role is Operational in nature, but with a DevOps bias, and has
plenty of interest and scope. This includes creating, designing and
improving 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 - with efficient use of
automation. 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. A willingness to learn these things is essential
though.