Senior Cloud Engineer - remote

Human Made, makers of Altis DXP
Posted 3 years ago
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.
The Role
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.
Requirements
Skills
  • Familiarity with Amazon Web Services, particularly services relating to high-availability web infrastructure. For example, EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, ALB, S3, Lambda, VPC, CloudFront, Security Groups, IAM, ASG, and ECS
  • Comfortable working from a Linux command-line
  • Good at problem-solving and troubleshooting
  • Comfortable with version control systems and corresponding workflows
  • Experience with orchestration tools and contributing to existing infrastructure-as-code, especially Terraform and CloudFormation
  • Ability to automate tasks
  • Familiarity with running WordPress (or comparable LEMP-based applications) at scale
  • In-depth understanding of performance considerations
  • In-depth understanding of security considerations
  • Ability to architect complex subsystems
  • Comprehensive understanding of Amazon Web Services (may be further developed on the job)
Responsibilities
  • Modifying, testing and deploying changes to infrastructure
  • Troubleshooting infrastructure issues
  • Regular communication with both your team and the rest of the company
  • Reporting technical system performance, maintenance, and outage issues to clients for both technical and non-technical audiences
  • Being available for on-call support duties during your working hours
  • Being available for occasional on-call duties outside of working hours (minimised where possible)
  • Performing code reviews
  • Take ownership at a project level for not only your own work, but work that interacts or impacts your own
  • Assisting other engineers on your team when asked for assistance
  • Carry out bug fixes and debugging not only in your own work, but others on your projects;no bug should be too obscure!
  • Take an active role in improving tooling, code, and communication whether directly on a current project or assisting others on their projects.
  • Remain informed on best practices within the industry
  • Proactively address technical issues as they arise
  • Consistently be pushing for performance and security considerations and improvements
  • Provide useful architectural input and feedback for whole systems, drawing on knowledge of DevOps fundamentals, other cloud computing paradigms or frameworks
  • Work with stakeholders and their expectations, navigating the relationship and taking ownership of stakeholder satisfaction
  • Write technical documentation for project architecture and decisions
Benefits
  • Salary range: $85,000 - $120,000 USD or local equivalent
  • Flexible working
  • 401k or pension
  • Health insurance
  • 52 weeks parental leave
  • 35 day maximum holiday policy
  • Sickness and carers leave
  • Annual company retreat
  • Time to contribute to open source
  • Conference and training budget
  • Monthly remote working allowance
  • Work wherever you want
  • New computer and mobile phone every two years
  • Office equipment when you need it