Platform Engineer (Remote - Work from Anywhere)

Position overview

A cloud native application platform automates infrastructure provisioning and configuration, dynamically allocating and reallocating resources at deploy time based on the needs of the application. Building on a cloud native runtime optimises application life-cycle management, including scaling to meet demand, resource utilisation, orchestration across available resources, and recovery from failures with minimum downtime.

This approach reduces cognitive load on teams (they have less to think about) and it creates a standard way of building software. This brings additional benefits with onboarding new developers or adding additional development teams. The platform team also has a role to play in developer mentoring and support; helping development teams understand how good cloud native software operates. 

In successful software organisations, development teams can consume core services in a self-service manner from a central platform team. Examples of such services include:

• Infrastructure provisioning (Compute, Network, Storage)
• CI/CD pipelines and underlying tooling
• Standardised mechanisms to log, monitor and troubleshoot their services in all environments
• Codified templates to create new services in line with agreed architectural patterns

Platform Engineering is a new function at Xapo and we are looking for a Platform Engineer to join this growing and exciting new function. 

We rely on the following tools and technologies. 

• Terraform
• AWS
• ECS
• RDS
• SQS
• VPC
• KMS
• Docker/Kubernetes
• Jenkins/CircleCI
• Newrelic

Although we are headquartered in Gibraltar, this is a full time, 100% remote position. Work from anywhere!

Responsibilities

The development community are your core customers. The driving principles that underpin this function are:

• A focus on the ongoing sustainable maintenance and operability of our developer platform. 
• Adopting cloud native principles and a focus upon relentless automation and testing of change.
• We will only operate what we absolutely must, favour buy over build and SaaS over on-prem.
• Providing high quality fast feedback to development teams.
• Building a platform that is architected to scale and handle change, be that new services, new customers, new regulations, new tooling or a change in demand.

You will:

• Proactively work to identify and reduce toil through the implementation of sustainable automated mechanisms
• Build high quality observability into everything we do by building self serve alerts, dashboards, metrics and events. 
• Deliver self-serve capabilities to our developers that allow them to provision, manage and operate their own infrastructure.
• Provide coaching and mentoring to colleagues around how to build sustainable services.
• Participate in our on call rota
• Keep security and compliance at the forefront of all you do

Skills needed

• Strong Problem solving skills and a growth mindset, the ability to learn and use the best in class technology and tools to address our requirements.
• A deep technical knowledge of software and systems – able to dive into details with engineers and speak in plain language with stakeholders.
• Stays abreast of current technology developments and has demonstrated the ability to retain competitive advantage by implementing relevant technologies in software products.
• Experience building immutable Infrastructure and Configuration as code, experience working in a GitOps environment a major plus.
• Ideally is comfortable in a variety of scripting and coding languages
• Deep knowledge and experience in designing, deploying, and administering complex Amazon AWS cloud environments. Preferably AWS certified and has a good understanding of the Amazon Well Architected Framework.
• Strong understanding of Docker and best practices.

Other requirements

• A dedicated workspace 
• A reliable internet connection with the fastest speed possible in your area
• Devices and other essential equipment that meet minimal technical specifications
• Alignment with Our Values.