Site Reliability Engineer (Remote)

Job Description

In this role

You will report to the Head of Infrastructure and will have responsibility for all aspects of Ably’s infrastructure services. Together, these provide compute capacity, networking, and all ancillary services required to operate the core services and support the complete development cycle for all Ably products and services.

You will be successful if you:

• Have a deep technical understanding of how systems work top-to-bottom and are committed to continuing to advance that understanding
• Enjoy getting your hands dirty, getting things done, and seeing your creations from inception through to production use by consumers’ apps
• Understand the Site Reliability Engineering discipline (https://go.ably.io/what-is-sre) and are excited by the idea of infrastructure-as-code and no manual maintenance of systems.
• Care about technical excellence in your work and fitness for purpose in your code
• Want to join a team that’s on a mission to provide the best possible service for our customers

You will be expected to participate in an on-call rotation after your onboarding and training phase.

Technical skills required

Ably is a cloud-native business with infrastructure that is almost wholly cloud-based, and we expect that to remain the case, at least in the near and medium term. Therefore, you must be intimately familiar with operations at scale on public cloud infrastructure, using the full range of functionality from the public cloud providers.

This is not a traditional sysadmin role, we expect software engineering skills. You will be working to support the work of our product engineering teams, so you will need a strong understanding of their pressures and needs. Ably’s infrastructure operations are based currently on internally-developed software for deployment and orchestration, instance management and health monitoring, plus administration of the multiple ancillary systems used to operate the service. Therefore, you need to be a developer first, and have an established record of software development in production systems.

As with all of our developer roles, we strongly prefer candidates that have a track record of working with open source, either with their own projects or contributions to community projects.

Much of our existing infrastructure management code is written in Ruby and Go. We very much would like to see Ruby experience, even if not as a main language, and Go experience is advantageous.

Our infrastructure runs in the public AWS cloud and therefore we need to see in-depth experience of operating production systems in the public cloud, and a detailed understanding of the full range of cloud services we use. Our software runs in large clusters and in AWS regions around the world, so experience with the engineering challenges of large, geographically distributed systems is valuable.

We expect you to be very strong technically in Linux systems administration and networking.

It would be great if you have:

• Containerisation, Docker;
• Service orchestration and configuration management frameworks;
• Go, Node.js and Bash;
• Cassandra;
• Experience with CI/CD systems;
• Our team are active open source contributors and are encouraged to do this as part of their role at Ably. We like new team members who enjoy contributing back to the open source community, even if those contributions are small.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

Founded by two engineers who spotted a hard and largely unsolved problem, Ably is, at its heart, an engineering company. To provide the infrastructure required for a high-bandwidth, always-connected world, we hire engineers with a broad set of technical skills who are ready and capable of taking on challenging realtime engineering problems.

As a company and engineering team we’re committed to a future internet that’s open, with all engineers contributing to existing open source projects.

We want to work in a company of inclusive people who treat each other well. As an Ablyan, you’ll enjoy taking ownership and making an impact, with work that is both varied and challenging. To thrive at Ably, you’ll need to believe in and be prepared to do your work in line with our values, which are:

• Open for all. Open is a mindset. When open, we’re better collaborators, communicators and creators. Whether open source, standards, or protocols, open hearts, minds, and eyes. It’s better when it’s open.
• Bias for action. We avoid analysis paralysis at all costs. We lean into doing in order to move us forward. When we have enough of what we need to act, we act.
• Even the best do better. We want to be the best - but that doesn’t mean we rest when we are. Improvement and growth - true betterment - is an ongoing journey. One fuelled by curiosity and taking risks.
• Technology needs humanity. Our technology means little without people - whether that’s how we treat our colleagues, or how we design developer experiences. Being human matters.
• Dependable people make dependable things. Dependability is integral to our mission and technology, but being dependable starts with our people. When we care enough to take real ownership of our products and problems - all else will follow.
• Bold creativity leads to the greatest rewards. When viewed through a different lens, what stands in the way can become the way. The bigger the challenge the easier the choice: bold creativity will always move us forward, create better outcomes, and set us apart.

What’s in it for you?

• A great company culture
• Share options
• The chance to learn and grow with a fast-moving company, supported by a learning budget of £1,000 that gives you access to professional training, events, conferences, workshops etc.
• Remote first: Unless you want to pop into our communal office space in Shoreditch, London, you’ll work from home most of the time, apart from when we have planning sessions and Summits. Travel to the office is at the employee's expense, apart from when we have Ably Summits
• Your choice of high quality tech kit to work on
• Home workstation set up budget of £500, plus an annual top-up of £150
• Regular company away days and social events
• Friday need-to-know drinks and snacks
• Private health insurance, including Doctor@Hand
• Access to private and confidential coaching via Sanctus
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme with AXA
• A monthly wellbeing budget with Juno
• Enhanced parental leave
• 25 days of paid annual leave (33 days including bank holidays)
• 10 days of paid sick leave (including mental health days) per year
• Dog friendly office for when you’re in the office!

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems - then we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the spec exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.

We believe our differences as individuals is what makes us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do, and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to creating long-term success as an organization. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, race, religion, educational background or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us, and we want anyone to be able to contribute to that opportunity.