Engineering Manager (Infrastructure)

Job Description

Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a realtime revolution. Whether attending an event in a virtual venue, receiving realtime financial information, or monitoring live car performance data – consumers simply expect realtime digital experiences as standard. Ably provides a suite of APIs to build, extend, and deliver powerful digital experiences in realtime for more than 265 million devices across 80 countries each month, supporting organizations like Toyota, Bloomberg, Hubspot and Split.

Working at Ably means helping to build the infrastructure and technology that will power and shape the future of the internet. The opportunity in front of us is immense. But we can’t rest yet. And we’d like your help. As Ably enters its next stage of growth, we’re looking for talented and curious individuals to help us build and deliver the platform to power synchronized digital experiences in realtime for one billion devices every week by 2024.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

Ably is entering a new phase of growth led by an experienced senior team. You’ll be part of a successful, highly motivated, and extremely collaborative team. We want to work in a company of inclusive people who treat each other well.

To see what life’s like at Ably, check out our careers page at ably.com/careers and read the story of how Ably's core values came to be.

Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Ably

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.

In this role

You will manage the people of the Infrastructure team, continually improve and refine their processes, and ensure they demonstrate success. The Infrastructure Team is responsible for the development, maintenance and smooth-running of our AWS-based shared infrastructure. We have a team of talented and ambitious SREs, who will be looking to you for leadership, guidance and coaching. It’ll be your role to enable them to achieve their best work and progress in their careers.

A large part of the value that Ably offers to customers comes from reliable, global infrastructure being already there. We deal with all the challenges of operating large scale infrastructure across the planet so that our customers don’t have to worry about it. As the leader of this team, you’re ultimately accountable for us delivering on this promise.

The team is highly technical with a mixed development and operational charter, so you’ll no-doubt like to get your hands dirty yourself at times. You should have sufficient experience deploying and maintaining large scale infrastructure yourself and an ongoing interest in technical details such that you’re able to lead empathetically and act on the advice of your technical experts.

Day to day, you will:

• Help us to set and attain Service Level Objectives that ensure a quality service is delivered to all customers. Detect problems early and plan work to keep us striving to be ever more reliable, scalable and efficient.
• Take line management responsibility for the Infrastructure team members.
• Ensure each team member is developing their skills, learning and advancing as per a development plan you’ve made together.
• Work with the CTO, CEO, Chief Scientist and Product and Delivery functions to ensure the team is aligned with wider company goals.
• Give continual context to the team to ensure they can prioritize effectively throughout their working day.
• Ensure team members are collaborating, sharing problems, and learning from each other.
• Ensure plans are realistic and well-structured.
• Help the team make continual process improvements.
• Work with the delivery team to ensure that cross-functional teams are staffed with SRE support wherever necessary, enabling your team to help the wider engineering group deliver on product strategy.
• Help the delivery team to manage the on-call rota, ensuring that your team contributes but are not overloaded or burnt out by it.
• Help the team promote its work and its knowledge within the organization, building the relationship with other Ably teams.
  

It would be great if you have:

• Site reliability engineering management experience in a SaaS or infrastructure business.
• Hands-on experience working on infrastructure in a public cloud environment.
• Demonstrable experience of owning team strategy, building a high-performance culture, and driving change within your team.
• Good experience with agile development and project management concepts.
  

It would be nice if you have:

• In-depth knowledge of and experience leading teams deploying large scale systems to AWS
• Knowledge of common concepts and best practices (infrastructure-as-code, containers, networking)
• Experience scaling infrastructure teams, including coaching new managers

What’s in it for you?

• A great company culture where every individual is valued and supported
• Share options. We believe that all Ablyans should share in our success and growth
• We’ll support your professional development with a £1000 annual learning budget and up to 10% learning and development time
• We’re remote first, so you can work flexibly in a way that fits your lifestyle. You’re also welcome to pop into our communal office space in Shoreditch, London if you want to collaborate in-person or socialise with the team.
• Fully-paid quarterly summits, where we take a few days to step back as a team and a company, to have some fun together and work on things we might not have time for day-to-day
• 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
• Weekly individual drinks and snacks budget
• Private healthcare, 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme and life assurance
• Access to private and confidential coaching with Sanctus
• A monthly wellbeing budget with Juno
• A matching pension contribution of 5%
• Life Assurance and Income Protection with Canada Life
• Financial Coaching with Octopus MoneyCoach
• A Cash Plan with SimplyHealth
• 27 days of paid annual leave plus a day off on your birthday (36 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 job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.