Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Remote (EMEA)
Job Description
Are you ambitious, hungry and keen to begin a new chapter in your career? Are you looking for a remote work opportunity? We are looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join our energetic and ambitious team who would also help us increase our security posture.
About Us
We are a purpose-driven business. Everything we do stems from our desire to empower entrepreneurs to make bright ideas happen, building their business from the ground up and becoming financially and professionally independent.
PeoplePerHour is an invaluable resource for small businesses in the UK and outside — giving them access to expert freelance talent on-demand so they can stay lean and flexible while growing.
We’ve been growing the freelance economy since 2007, being one of the first pioneers of the now ubiquitous on-demand economy. Since then we’ve amassed a community of over 3m skilled freelancers, served almost 1.5m businesses across over 180 countries and paid out more than £150m to freelancers over the years.
Our mission is to empower entrepreneurs, with the use of our freelancer marketplace, to turn their bright ideas into reality.
We constantly push the boundary by launching new products, investing our organic profits in new product development not just on the PeoplePerHour platform but also others in adjacent markets serving more specialised use cases. TalentDesk.io is our latest example of that — an enterprise SaaS product that allows large corporates to manage all their freelance workforce easily and seamlessly in one place, at scale.
Our Tools
We constantly use bleeding edge technology and at the same time, we endorse experimentation. Our internal monitoring systems make sure all our experiments are performed in isolation so hey, go nuts!
This is an outline of our current tech:
- Our web app is in ReactJS using Redux and supported by NodeJS
- Our Back end is in PHP using Yii, Laravel, and lumen
- We use ReactNative for our mobile app
- All our apps are dockerised
- Our servers work on Kubernetes - the master of the universe!
- We like microservices. It is our way to move from a legacy monolith to a Services Oriented Architecture and to modernise our stack
- We like serverless technologies even more
- We use databases of all sorts to suit our needs: MySQL, Aurora, ElasticSearch, Redis, DynamoDB.
- Data Science is our way to the future! Our projects run on Java and Python and also consume a number of third-party tools.
About the role
We are looking for a new Senior Site Reliability engineer to join our team and work remotely. As a Site Reliability engineer, you help automate away toil, build diagnostic tools and be a bridge across teams to ensure the right people are in the know at the right time. You will contribute to our core Application, our microservices, serverless parts of our stack and also interact with a multitude of databases. You will help set up the initial infrastructure for our new Enterprise SaaS tool, TalentDesk.io, ensuring we have an industry-leading security posture. For example, we are considering getting SOC2 compliance for talentdesk.io and need someone to initiate and lead the Project.
About you
- You act like an owner and are selfless while being accountable and goal oriented
- You are a team player and do not throw the ball over the fence.
- You are proud of the code you produce. Admittedly, nothing is perfect and so refactoring is your friend. You always like to leave the code better than you found it, in fact, it’s how you code every day.
Main responsibilities:
- Prevent unscheduled system downtime, achieve good system availability and performance.
- Maintain the infrastructure and development environment - Keep things running smoothly, tackle pain-points.
- Participate in our out-of-hours support roster and on-call duties and responsibilities. Respond to outages and errors.
- Monitor system health and performance, setup alerts, architect for stability. Do proactive monitoring, not only reactive activities.
- Improve system observability, capture logs and data, expose them to the team. Glean insight.
- Security - The team is ultimately responsible for system security. You will own the security projects future roadmap and ongoing backlog. You will design and build security into the services running in the AWS environment. Over time, I expect you will spend up to 50% of your time on security related projects, rather than SRE tasks. I.e. DevSecOps.
- Enforce engineering excellence and quality, ensuring teams are delivering high value results.
- Work with internal teams in the design phase of software to advise on architecture/infrastructure/security decisions.
- Manage software upgrades - Replace out-dated, deprecated or retired systems and software.
- Reduce infrastructure costs - capacity planning, infrastructure optimisation.
- Aid in setting up the infrastructure for our Enterprise SaaS tool, TalentDesk.io.
Ideally, you’ll
- Have 4+ years experience working in a large scale web application and deep understanding of how the web works.
- Have 2+ years experience working within AWS, with experience of the most common AWS services.
- Have 1+ years experience with Kubernetes, operating it and managing apps run within.
- Have previous experience working with microservices - we need expertise in adopting a Services-Oriented Architecture.
- Have previous experience working with Build tools such as CircleCI, Jenkins, TravisCI, etc (we use CircleCI and GitHub Actions).
- Be strong with Docker including building dockerised apps and running docker in production.
- Strong understanding of architecting a web app optimised to run in containers. i.e. the 12-factor app methodology.
- Have prior knowledge of solving scalability problems.
- Have Advanced GNU/Linux knowledge, comfortable with the CLI and shell scripting.
- Be strong with networking, DNS principles and the HTTP(S) protocol.
- Be interested and enthusiastic about Security. Web app security, Linux server security and Cloud security. Educate others on security improvements so as to try to get all developers in the company to become security minded.
- Appreciate the benefits of Infrastructure-as-Code, supporting our Terraform culture.
- Work with incident response, doing post mortems with a blameless culture.
- Have aptitude for capacity planning to analyse and reduce infrastructure costs.
- Manage our Automated Tests: Maintain and improve our CI/CD pipeline to test and deploy new services efficiently.
- Have a strong understanding of relational databases including query optimisation skills.
- Be comfortable with Git, enough to coach other team members on git usage.
And you’ll
- Value site uptime, understanding that it is the most important metric for this role.
- Think analytically and methodically with high attention to detail.
- Understand the importance of reducing toil by aggressively pursuing automation.
- Take extra time to consider out of the different solutions which one is the simplest. Less is more.
- Refactor problematic, incomplete parts and constantly improve our codebase. Reduce technical debt.
- Deliver testable, efficient, reusable, high quality and easy to read code.
- Contribute to our tests, Unit tests, integration tests, etc.
- Follow coding standards and apply good practices.
- Measure and improve performance, using tools like New Relic and Kibana.
- Review the code of fellow devs to promote code quality.
- Help with design decisions, particularly for our API.
- Assist developers so they can build software smoothly.
- Keep an eye on new technology, especially new AWS services and propose how to capitalise on it for a simpler / faster / cheaper system.
Bonus points if you
- Worked with Service Mesh before.
- Have a track record of team leading and supervision.
- Worked with PHP and/or Javascript before.
- Have prior experience managing ElasticSearch clusters.
- Have used DynamoDB, MongoDB or other NoSQL databases to store application data.
- Have performed Penetration testing before.
- Have worked on a Bug Bounty Programme before.
Benefits
- We pay a competitive base with yearly pay reviews.
- Remote / Flexible work - freelancing is all about flexibility after all...
- Build your own profile and skills. We serve freelancers and we understand how vital constant learning and improvement is!
- Work with great colleagues of excellent caliber and ambition.
Location
London (UK), Athens (Greece) or Remote (EMEA)
What should you do next?
If you feel this is the right role for you, please submit your CV.
Next, we set up a phone interview with one of our engineers. This will focus on your technical skills and culture fit.
As part of our dedication to the diversity of our workforce, PeoplePerHour is committed to Equal Employment Opportunity without regard for race, colour, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion.