Senior Platform Engineer

Job Description

Whereabouts: We within CET +/- 9 hours and have some restrictions on hiring engineering

Interviews: Around 4 hours over a few weeks, including some practical work

Salary: Starting at £72,000 (€83,000)

Reporting to: Engineering Manager (Platform)

Ask us anything: careers@whereby.com 

Please note: If you aren’t seeing this role advertised on https://jobs.lever.co/whereby the role is likely closed for new applications. Unfortunately, we are not always in control of where our roles are posted as many websites post our roles without our express consent. For this reason, you may be reading out of date information - we are so sorry about that. Our careers team is always on hand to answer questions, drop us a line at careers@whereby.com

Your mission at Whereby*

As a member of our Platform team, you'll focus on one of two closely related goals:

Infrastructure: to further the scalability, resilience, reliability, security and global availability of our product and core platform,

Developer Effectiveness: to enable teams across the company to ship high-quality software multiple times a day, and equip them to own and operate those services effectively.

*This is the mission that moves you and your team through our strategic roadmap, and should be your focus for up to a year or two.

What is Whereby all about

Freedom to work from anywhere: our mission with Whereby is to give people freedom to live and work where they thrive.

📍 Our global HQ is in Oslo, Norway, but our users (and team) are worldwide - having been used in nearly every country in the world by millions of folk. 🌏

By making it possible to collaborate as well over video as you can in real life, we want to give you the choice to work from where your life happens. To allow you to be in a place where you can think and focus, but also allow a seamless and instant connection with others when you need to.

For our 100+ team members, and also for our customers, we know that the ability to decouple location from work can be life-changing. They can afford the house they want, can spend less time commuting, be closer to nature, and their children get to grow up seeing their grandparents every day. Everyone on our team enjoys the enormous benefits that a flexible work policy brings, and we truly believe the future of work will gravitate towards our vision of the future.

Engineering at Whereby

We strongly believe in the superpowers of a well-led, and expertly designed engineering team. We are an engineering-centric business who hopes to scale our operation sustainably, with beautiful code, an ethical approach to our users and data, and an innovative opinion on new technologies in the market.

We try to ensure both that we're building the right thing and building the thing right. We analyse data, talk to users, prototype and iterate. We focus on discovering and solving user problems, not just building and shipping features. As a member of our engineering team you’ll take on a key role in this process and see your work be used by millions of users worldwide.

🔍 What we're looking for in our Senior Platform Engineer

We're looking for engineers to help us build, run and scale the infrastructure that supports millions of customers globally. You'll help us drive a DevOps culture across all our product teams, and build the infrastructural foundations necessary to make everyone effortlessly effective at owning and operating their software.

🌎 We believe in everyone

We fundamentally believe talent is distributed to all of us in equal measure. We open our doors (physical or url) to everyone and we see our differences as a strength; it’s this philosophy that drives us towards our mission.

This means we see your unique history as having a value money cannot buy; we believe in the strength of every intersection of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity.

⚒️ The nuts and bolts of the role*

* Please do not see everything in this job ad as "must have", but rather a guiding list of what we're looking for. We know that no candidate will be the perfect match for all we've mentioned in this posting, so don't be afraid to apply if you feel you're close to the brief but not "spot on"

Your attributes

• Collaborative
• Self-driven
• Goal-orientated
• Pragmatic
• Operational (in the detail)

Your previous experience

• We are prioritising attitude, aptitude, and the kind of impact you’ve had over years' experience. With that said, you may be a good fit if you...
• Have rich and varied experience as a Platform Engineer / Systems Engineer / DevOps Engineer over a number of years.
• Have experience working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their products.
• Have spent lots of time with Linux, and some time with Node.js,
• Have built solutions that enable other engineers to ship and operate software – like CI/CD processes, metrics collection (we use Prometheus & Grafana), log aggregation (we use Kibana & ElasticSearch).
• Know how to quantify, prioritise and improve on the important properties of cloud infrastructure – such as scalability, resilience, fault tolerance, global availability, and security.
• Have led ambitious projects from the idea stage all the way through to the retrospective
• Have expert knowledge of information security principles.
• Communicate proactively and like to work in collaboration with others inside and outside your team.
• Enjoy working in distributed teams.
• You might not meet every single one of these, but please don’t let that discourage you. We are all learning every day and we love to work with self-aware people with a growth mindset.

How we'll measure your success🌟

• We’ll know you’re doing a fantastic job when...
• You're delivering measurable improvements to our infrastructure, and the foundational services our engineers rely upon to ship and support their services
• Your peers, and leaders within platform, are giving positive feedback about your impact on them, the platform, and the product.
• The uptime and reliability of our platform exceeds customer expectations!

Strategic responsibilities

• Ensure secure, scalable and reliable processes for the operations of our infrastructure. We strive for security and privacy by design and want everything we ship to users to be robust, globally.
• Work with the engineering team in understanding challenges related to Developer Effectiveness, bringing ideas for measuring and improving their ability to ship and operate software that meets our standards and principles.
• Collaborate with our product teams to deliver on projects that require new infrastructure or changes to the foundations of our platform.
• Work with your manager and the area tech lead to determine the short and long term goals and priorities for the Platform team

Tactical responsibilities

• Contribute to a diverse engineering culture based on customer-centricity, high-quality code, data-driven decisions, technical innovation, inclusion and diversity.
• Working with Github, Terraform, Amazon AWS infrastructure to further the development of our platform.
• Ensure that our infrastructure meets a high standard of security, maintainability and operability at all times – adapting to the needs of the wider team and the challenges of a growing customer base.
• Define, scope and execute projects to improve our infrastructure, foundational services such as logging and monitoring, and CI/CD practices.
• Improve our on-call and incident handling processes

Foundational responsibilities

• Identify opportunities for new technologies, and make suggestions for how they can be used to improve the platform.
• Work as a member of the Platform team, collaborating in planning, stand-ups and retrospectives
• Consult and inform the wider engineering organisation on the work of the Platform team
• Participate in the on-call rota (for the foundational systems your team owns) and support others across the business to do the same

Your progression

• You’ll work directly with your manager and the Technical Lead (Platform & Media) on your day-to-day priorities. You’ll report to an Engineering Manager who will work with you on your progression – aiming to make sure you’re happy, challenged and doing the best work of your career every day. They’ll also help you find training and development opportunities.
• We offer career progression routes for individual contributors, technical leaders, and managers. In this role, there is a clear opportunity to develop leadership skills within our platform team. That said, you don’t need to become a team lead in order to progress here. It’s all about the impact you’re able to have. And there’s no shortage of opportunity to have an impact at Whereby – on the product, the business, the approach we take to product development and engineering, and on your colleagues.