Senior Cloud Engineer - remote

Human Made is looking for a Senior Cloud Engineer to join its global team. This is a remote position but you should be based in the Americas region (North or South America).

Human Made helps organisations drive customer engagement, reinforce brand value and improve operations with digital solutions powered by Altis, our WordPress digital experience platform. 

Over the past 10+ years, we’ve helped brands such as TechCrunch, CapGemini and USA Today build and deliver their digital strategies, transforming the way people interact with some of the most visited websites in the world. We have deep expertise and investment in using WordPress as a tool to create large-scale platforms, websites, and applications that drive transformational business value. 

Our decade of experience in agile delivery and passion for open source solutions supports clients in their journey to embrace the edge of innovation. Human Made is a fully distributed company, with employees based remotely around the world.

As a Senior Cloud Engineer at Human Made, you will work to build and operate the cloud hosting platform underpinning Altis DXP, which serves tens of billions of page requests every year. You’ll work alongside the rest of the Product team, building and operating the platform with other Product and Cloud Engineers.

The Altis DXP cloud platform is a containerised LEMP platform running on Amazon Web Services. The Altis software is based on WordPress, so you should be able to architect complex infrastructure solutions that cater to it. This includes familiarity with scaling considerations, security best practices, caching, and performance considerations. Knowledge of WordPress best practices relating to performance and security is an advantage, as this will allow you to contribute to code review and cross-functional architectural decisions.

Human Made uses Terraform to manage infrastructure as code, in addition to legacy usage of CloudFormation;experience with and understanding of these tools is essential. You should have a good knowledge of Amazon Web Services, Linux system administration, containerised platforms (such as Docker and ECS), and scaling LEMP-based systems in general.

As a Cloud Engineer, you will be on-call during working hours for any site availability issues that arise. Our globally-distributed nature means out-of-hours support is rare, but may sometimes be required. You should be a good, professional communicator when providing client support in the event of site outages or other issues affecting availability or maintenance. You’ll be responsible for either directly solving or coordinating support issues while you are on-call.

Human Made is a remote company which means that you need to be able to work both independently and as part of a remote team. Good communication skills are essential to be successful in the job. You should be able to prioritise your work and meet any deadlines, communicating any problems upstream along the way.

You should be prepared to learn new technologies, frameworks or software when required. These could be outside of your engineering comfort zone. You are expected to have a can-do attitude when tackling new technical challenges, working with team-wide decisions that may not be your own and dealing with client relationship frustrations.

The responsibilities and expectations of a Senior Cloud Engineer are not necessarily tied exclusively to your own tasks. While you will need to apply your skills to each task you are assigned to, you are also expected to set a similar example when interacting with any other team members for meta-level tasks. This could be cross-project code review, helping others debug problems, or offering advice and architectural guidance to other projects.

As a senior engineer you should lead by example when working on projects, giving critical feedback via code review to peers, and respecting other engineering decisions. Your broad experience may mean you have strong preferences for technical decisions. It’s both your responsibility to voice concerns about technical decisions being made as well as having the distance and maturity to accept decisions made by the team.