Senior / Principal DevOps Engineer

Job Description

At a Glance

Us: Default alive startup of 70+ people. Remote team, mainly based in the UK. YC alumni. Building a web-based platform for behavioural research. £4.4M revenue in 2020, all driven by word-of-mouth.

We’re on a mission to connect people around the world to make trustworthy data more accessible and facilitate world-changing research.

You: Experienced operations engineer with experience leading a small team and revamping existing organic infrastructure. Happy working side by side with engineers following DevOps practices.

The Role

We're looking for an experienced Senior DevOps Engineer. In this role you will play a key role in developing and guiding the direction of our infrastructure. Being a young startup, we have built up a certain level of infrastructure already but now we need to prepare it for scaling (both of our users and of our team). This is close to a green field opportunity: you’ll get to decide what our infrastructure should look like, all the while supporting our existing teams with ongoing product development. We want our DevOps team to be able to work closely together, as well as integrate within other teams when the need arises.

You should have broad practical knowledge as well as some experience leading other engineers in your domain.

How we Operate

Our engineers are split into small multi-discipline teams of 3-7 people (engineers, product designers, UX, product managers). These teams are problem-focused and work on high level objectives. Each team use 6-12 week cycles to meet the objectives with continuous delivery throughout the cycle.

We have a strong belief in the value of testing - both integration and unit testing. All code goes through code review.

Deep work is valued throughout the company. We favour async communication over Slack and Notion. When we need to communicate in real-time we try to group meetings together to give everyone bigger blocks of interruption-free time.

Our problem-focused teams allow for regular innovation, which we foster further with workshops and hack-days, building things like study debriefing tools and experiments comparing our platform to competitors like MTurk.

Continuous learning and development is strongly encouraged. Everyone gets a personal development budget which they can put towards things like books, courses and conferences, and reserve times every fortnight for learning new things or working on creative side-projects.

We’re aware of the challenges of being a remote worker and work hard to foster team-spirit. We encourage remote chats over coffee with colleagues and have regular team meetings to keep everyone up to date with goings on across the company and introduce new joiners.

We believe that we are in the process of successfully building a company that people enjoy working for. Our employees should feel valued, supported, and fulfilled. We know that there’s always more that we could be doing and have regular conversations about what we can improve. Everyone’s opinion is important and all input is taken on board.

What you'll be doing

• Assessing our current infrastructure and working with the engineering team to establish what needs to change.
• Leading your team to implement infrastructure changes.
• Monitoring the platform's usage and flagging scaling issues before they occur.
• Keeping our infrastructure secure and helping engineers understand security requirements of infrastructure.

What you'll bring

• Experience of building and scaling infrastructure for web applications or platforms
• Experience managing systems in a cloud environment
• Experience leading other engineers on DevOps topics
• Experience of running Kubernetes in Production
• Experience defining and building CI/CD pipelines
• Strong desire to drive automation

What we offer

• Flexible working: You can work flexibly from home or from our dog-friendly co-working space.
• £1000 home office budget and laptop when you start and a £200 yearly top-up budget.
• 33 days holiday per year (25 days + bank holidays, which you can switch with any day of your choosing).
• Pension (employer contribution 3% of base salary).
• Comprehensive private health insurance that disregards medical history.
• Taxable stipend of £150 a month per person for wellness and improving your remote experience (co-working subscription, gym membership, lunches, etc.)
• £1000 yearly budget for education, growth, and training.
• £1000 yearly budget on discretionary meet-ups (travel, hotel, food, etc.)
• Fun and collaborative quarterly company-wide meet-ups and team socials paid for by us.
• Personal growth opportunities and career progression (e.g., learn about the startup ecosystem, mentoring from executive team, learn about psychological science and research methods).
• Childcare flexibility: Need to pick your child up from school? No problem.
• Generous maternity, paternity, and shared parental leave.
• A company committed to carbon offsetting: we donate money in your name each month to plant trees and we offset travel as an organisation each year.
• Open, transparent, and inclusive culture.

The Company

At Prolific, we're changing how research on the internet is done. Our co-founders Katia and Phelim started by building a marketplace that connects researchers from both Academia and industry with instant, high quality, global research participants. Now, as a growing team, our bigger vision is to build the most powerful and trusted platform for behavioural research.

The Interview Process

Initial Interview - You'll have a 30 - 45 minute interview with two members of the team where you'll have the opportunity to ask about the company and the role, and we'll ask you questions about your experiences and goals.

Assignment - There will be a 2 hour assignment that evaluates skills required for the role. You'll be compensated with a £50 voucher for completing the task because we know your time is valuable!

Final Interview - The final stage is a 1.5 - 2 hour interview where we'll deep dive into your past experiences, goals, motivations, and skills. You'll speak with two to three members of the team and - as always - have an opportunity to ask questions about the role and company.