Associate Engineer (Internal Platform)

A day in the life

As an Associate Engineer, your mission is to design, maintain, and champion a reliable and secure platform that powers ManyPets products and services. In this role, you are responsible for building the foundational infrastructure that supports our company's growth and innovation.

Your work will involve designing and implementing scalable cloud solutions that can accommodate increased workloads and traffic without sacrificing reliability or performance. You will be pivotal in maintaining a high level of platform observability, allowing teams to monitor system health and quickly identify and resolve issues. This will require a focus on building resilient systems with robust security measures to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance with industry standards.

Additionally, you will be a key advocate for improving the developer experience, promoting a culture of automation and self-service. This means creating and refining tools that allow developers to deploy, test, and scale their applications with minimal friction, enabling them to focus on building features and products that delight customers.

Collaboration will be central to your role, as you will work closely with development, security, and operations teams to ensure the platform meets their needs. You will also engage in knowledge sharing, training, and documentation to empower other teams to use the platform effectively.

Your responsibilities

Improve the internal platform

• Reduce the complexity of building and deploying business services
• Improve budgeting and forecasting of cloud spend
• Simplify compliance checking
• Provide regular infrastructure updates
• Build security and guardrails into our solutions

Embed Site Reliability Engineering practices

• Shift from reactive to proactive monitoring
• Build customer and end-user centric observability
• Make it easy to do the right thing through well documented solutions

Provide well-architected cloud services

• Improve operational efficiency and excellence
• Build resilient, performant, scalable and secure services
• Reduce complexity
• Follow best practice

Team collaboration

• Work closely with other teams to ensure timely resolution of queries
• Serve as a point of contact for internal colleagues.
• Communicate effectively with internal teams and your squad

Your skills and experience

• Development experience in building database-driven web applications using a serverless, event-driven architecture with NoSQL databases.
• Proficiency in one or more scripting languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python.
• Experience working within the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) in an SRE capacity, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance of systems.
• Hands-on experience with Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, including services like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Functions.
• Familiarity with DevOps principles and tools for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, or CircleCI.
• Ability to conduct Performance and Security reviews, identifying and mitigating risks and bottlenecks in applications and infrastructure.
• Problem-solving skills and a proactive mindset to drive improvements in system reliability, performance, and security.

The interview process

This position has a two-step interview process, which will be held via Zoom.

• Stage 1 – an informal meeting with the hiring manager for about 45 minutes. We’ll explain more about the role and explore how your experience matches up with what we need.
• Stage 2 – you’ll meet two of our managers in the team. This will be a longer interview up to an hour and we’ll ask you some competency questions and dig into your technical understanding.

About the team

The EPD ("Engineering, Product and Design") team operates with a squad system and Agile ways of working within quarterly terms - and we really enjoy working collaboratively. We hold regular ‘Hack Weeks’ to look at products and address problems relating to the business, and we get the chance to highlight and work on things we’re interested in and feel passionately about. We are on a mission to become the best we can be, constantly challenging ourselves to achieve and learn.  You will be supported to learn new technology – both in breadth and depth - and encouraged to challenge our ways of thinking with new and innovative ideas.

Our “north star” is to become an elite performer as defined by the 4 key DORA metrics.  To drive towards elite status, we apply and continually inspect and adapt the best Agile frameworks and practices inspired by DevOps, SRE, Scrum, XP and Lean.  We are a highly collaborative environment and regularly practice Mob and Pair based programming which we believe improve our quality of delivery and share understanding.

We take our operational performance, security, and reliability as seriously as our quality and development practices.  We are entirely cloud hosted on AWS and highly automated. Some specific technologies we use include: Python | AWS Lambda | MongoDB | Vue.JS | CDK