Overview

You will be joining a fast-paced engineering team made up of people with significant experience working with terabytes of data. We believe that everybody has something to bring to the table, and therefore put collaborative effort and team-work above all else (and not just on the engineering side). You will be able to work autonomously as an equally trusted member of the team, and participate in efforts such as:

- Addressing high availability problems: cross-region data replication, disaster recovery, etc.

- Addressing “big data” problems: 200+ millions of messages/day, 60B data points since 2010 (currently growing at a rate of 6B per month).

- Improving our infrastructure setup and deploy new services to support our growing needs

- Expanding our platform’s observability through monitoring, logging, alerting and tracing

Our Stack

- Monitoring: VictoriaMetrics (+ vmalert and vmagent), Grafana
- Alerting: AlertManager, Sensu Go
- Logging: Vector
- Caching: Redis (phasing out in favor of FoundationDB)
- Secrets management and PKI: Vault
- Configuration management and provisioning: Terraform, Ansible
- Service discovery: Consul
- Messaging: Kafka
- Proxying: HAProxy
- Service deployment: Terraform, Nomad (plugged in Consul and Vault), Kubernetes (to a lesser extent, used for non production critical workloads)
- Database systems: ClickHouse (main datastore), FoundationDB (caching, deduplication)
- Operating System: Ubuntu 18.04

Your Missions

- Take ownership of our self-managed infrastructure and improve its performance, resiliency, availability as well as cost effectiveness
- Harden our infrastructure and its processes: audit logging, mTLS, network QoS, etc.
- Work hand-in-hand with the business team and our software engineers to debug and improve our processing and delivery systems
- Build and manage our SRE team in the future.

We are wrapping up a complete infrastructure migration and have big plans for our infrastructure in the year to come: as our first system administrator you will be given a lot of freedom to suggest and implement the solutions that best suit the company’s needs. We will also rely on you to structure and assemble your future team as the SRE Director starting Q3 2020.

Who We Are Looking For

- Significant experience as a System Administrator/Ops
- Autonomous with either Chef, Puppet or Ansible (yes, apples and oranges)
- Solid knowledge of Linux (debian-based distributions and ubuntu by extension) and system administration (we like flame graphs)
- Very familiar with communication protocols (layer 3 and up)
- Previous experience managing small teams of 3-4 people

Please note that we don’t have any “hard” requirements in terms of technologies: we are primarily interested in people capable of adapting to an ever changing landscape of technical requirements, who learn fast and are not afraid to constantly push our technical boundaries. It is not uncommon for us to benchmark new technologies for a specific feature, or to change our infrastructure in a big way to better suit our needs.

The most important skills for us revolve around two things:
- What we like to call “core” knowledge: how everything fits together (software, hardware, network, etc)
- How fast you can adapt to a technology you didn’t know existed 10 minutes ago

In short, we are looking for someone able to create, secure, make observable, maintain and scale (up or down) our infrastructure with our business needs in mind, which the technical needs are themselves derived from. That person should also be willing to be the first of many, to build and lead our SRE team as we interview, recruit and onboard new systems administrators in the future.

Personal Skills

- Honest, getting and giving feedback is very important to you
- Humble, making new errors is an essential part of your journey
- Empathetic, you feel a sense of responsibility for all the team’s endeavors and don’t pay attention to the individual level of involvement
- Committed, as an equally important member of the team, you want to make yourself heard while respecting everybody’s point of view
- Fluent in written and spoken English (we have 5 different nationalities in the team!)
- You have the utmost respect for legacy code and infrastructure, with some occasional and perfectly understandable respectful complaints

We do our best to select people that lead by example and experience rather than by position or seniority.

Recruitment Process

- Hangout/Meet/Discord (20mins)
- Meeting with the head of engineering as well as another senior member of the team for a technical/product RPG: you read that right, no written test, no whiteboard quicksort implementation (1h30)
- Informal discussion with other members of the company (business, sales, 30m) and HR meeting (20mins).
- Meeting with our CEO

Each step is generally held on a different day, we do our best to follow-up in the next 24 hours, and we always provide the candidates with a thorough explanation of our decision.

Company Perks

• Hardware of your choice
• Paid vacation
• Health insurance
• Multiple team events (annual retreat, casual drinks, etc.)
• An entrepreneurial environment with a lot of autonomy and responsibilities
• Staff surprises: just because we know that occasionally, small delights can brighten your day
• Other perks

Additional Information

• Contract type: Permanent - full time
• International applicants welcome!

Interested? Apply now by emailing your resume and a short introduction to jobs@kaiko.com!