Golang Job: Site Reliability Engineer

SearchPilot is looking for an experienced UK-based SRE to help us build and improve our rapidly growing and evolving infrastructure. Our infrastructure is built inside AWS, and we work closely with our customers’ own tech teams to ensure our integrations with their technology stacks are robust.

SearchPilot built the first SEO A/B testing platform to come to market. We are on a mission to prove the value of SEO for the world’s biggest websites by empowering them to make agile changes and test their impact, and we are looking to expand our small engineering team.

Preferred skills /experience

We’d love to meet anyone who ticks most of the following - note that you do not need to have deep experience in all of these areas to apply:

• A strong communicator who can explain technical concepts clearly, the role involves speaking with customers regularly
• Enjoys getting things right whilst realising that done is better than perfect
• Enjoys learning new things
• Self-directed and self-motivated
• Strong AWS experience and knowledge
• Good understanding of HTTP & networking; for our proxy layer it is important to understand this well
• Exposure to various CDNs is useful, but not essential
• Prometheus (with Thanos/Cortex) experience is helpful

The role sits within the current engineering team of 8 people, and you will work alongside our existing SRE, reporting directly to the CTO.

SearchPilot operates by sitting between a customers’ CDN and their origin server, which means that resiliency and performance are of utmost importance to us. We are looking for somebody who has strong AWS knowledge and can help build the backend infrastructure needed for new product features, as well as help us squeeze the existing infrastructure to be as performant as possible.

Technologies we currently use:

• AWS: EC2, ECS, RDS, ELB, NAT Gateway, Route53, CloudFormation, Kinesis, S3, KMS, Fargate, Batch, CodePipeline & more
• We use Python in places for controlling orchestration
• Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana
• Our proxy layer is homegrown in Golang
• The web app is Django + React

What we offer:

• Expected salary range £55-90k depending on experience
• 25 days annual leave plus 8 bank holidays
• Subsidised private healthcare and life insurance
• 5% pension matching
• Subsidised gym membership
• A laptop and second monitor
• A Kindle with some books preloaded
• A £600 personal budget each year you can use to make you happier or more productive at work such as a new flashy monitor, a new office chair, or training
• Company-funded drinks and snacks on Friday afternoons (when we’re in the office!)

What the role involves (more detail):

• Working with developers to spec out and build out solutions to cater to new features. A recent example was deploying Kinesis to gather streaming data from 7 AWS regions, which is then aggregated and stored centrally.
• Customer facing calls (1-2 a week discussing integration with customer teams, responding to the odd ad hoc query from customers). This means you need strong communication skills, and it is also helpful to have broad knowledge of technologies beyond the ones we directly use, as we work with customers using a variety of solutions.
• Iterative improvements and refinements to what we have. For us performance and resilience are absolutely critical, and there is still plenty of scope for further improvements here. We are looking for someone not just to make the improvements, but to ideate them and drive them forward.
• In the late stage of the sales cycle, we typically have a couple of rounds of integration calls with prospective customers to work out what challenges we might face and help them understand what deployment looks like.

• We have customers using Akamai, CloudFlare, Fastly, CloudFront and more as CDNs, and with a wide variety of backend technologies.

• After you have bedded in you will join the on call rota. In the last few months, we have seen maybe one call a month, and these are often in work hours.

Location Flexibility

We are looking for applications from UK-based candidates who wish to work primarily remotely in the UK within reach of occasional travel to London. As things normalise after COVID-19, we will expect remote team members to meet in our London office about once every 2-3 months.

We believe in the benefits of working remotely, but also value a sense of shared mission and personal community, which benefits from sometimes getting together. If your circumstances don’t perfectly align with this, we are flexible to discussion.

Our culture

At SearchPilot we are passionate about our team, and we want that to be more than just words. We want to continue to build a team of people who can thrive and succeed, as well as feel valued and welcomed, at all levels.

As part of that goal, we are trying hard to actively build a diverse team, as we believe diversity is a necessary component to building the strongest company possible. To this end, one of the steps we have taken is committing to an annual report assessing how we are doing on this front: 2020 report / 2021 report.

SearchPilot does not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, marital status, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion, or any other characteristic irrelevant to an individual’s ability to fulfil the relevant role. We are committed not only to meeting our legal obligations in this area, but also to the positive promotion of diversity in our teams.

Application Process

To apply for this role please complete the form below. We are more interested in your skills and potential than we are in where you went to school or whether you went to university, but some SRE/DevOps experience is essential.

We anticipate the interview process will include a short qualification call followed by 2 remote video interviews with different members of the team. We may ask you to complete a short technical task between the interview rounds.

Job Type: Permanent

Salary: £55,000.00-£90,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Company pension
• Life insurance
• Private medical insurance
• Work from home

Schedule:

• Monday to Friday

Experience:

• HTTPS: 3 years (required)
• AWS: 3 years (required)
• Python: 3 years (preferred)

Work authorisation:

• United Kingdom (required)

Reference ID: CIRUCR6