We’re looking for a Senior Systems Engineer who cares about building, improving, and scaling systems that enrich the personal and professional lives of our customers. Our products are used in libraries, startups, classrooms and fortune 500 companies. We help people teach themselves, share knowledge, and succeed in their careers.
In this role, you’ll work alongside our team of Systems Engineers with the explicit goals of collaborating with developers and helping a broad range of colleagues use our infrastructure to solve problems.
A Senior Systems Engineer at Safari is responsible for infrastructure automation for our web applications (namely monitoring, metrics, log analysis, and server deployment), and supporting our diverse development team. You should have a sense of pride, ownership, and responsibility toward the systems you work on, which means that you do something when see a problem, even if it isn’t always you that fixes it.
Your Skills & Our Environment
Our existing application environment runs Ubuntu 12.04/14.04 LTS, Postgres, Nginx, Uwsgi, Chef, and VMware. There is a growing interest in Docker throughout the organization and it’s our job to help evaluate and support its adoption if it becomes a viable tool for everyone. . Other additions include Logentries, https://dan.fast.ly, and RabbitMQ. We dabble in Python and Ruby to change things more sustainably and reliably.
We expect you to have a good foundation in both virtualization and configuration management and be comfortable around a data center. In addition, you should be familiar with scaling services to make them stable and reliable. It’s most important that you’re curious (never treating anything as a “black box” that couldn’t be better understood), and interested in making everything incrementally better than the current iteration.
We want you to be constantly learning, and have a thirst for knowledge. Your should work inspire you make you want to share what you’ve learned with the rest of the team. We want to see you constantly exploring ways to make “bad” things “good” and “good” things “great”. You should show us how you’ve grown professionally and how you’ve made the places you’ve worked even better.
We are dedicated to experimentation, strong relationships with our product and engineering colleagues, and a core belief in work-life balance. We welcome diversity and non-traditional paths into the technology profession, and advocate strongly for hiring the right person as opposed to the right combination of technology keywords.
Some Things You’ll Work On
Participate in a weekly 24/7 on-call schedule. You’d be on about every 6 weeks. Like you, none of us here likes being woken up by the pager, least of all when there’s no action to take on an alert, so we have a goal of driving those alerts to zero through a process of iteration and improvement. In the last 9 months we’ve gone from 14% actionable alerts to 70% actionable alerts.
Improving our automation. We hate doing repetitive boring tasks and strive to spend our time doing fun and exciting things instead. You’ll be expected to improve our existing automation infrastructure and making machines do the boring stuff. You’ll be writing Chef cookbooks and recipes, testing them, getting feedback from your peers and deploying to production daily if need be.
Building services for our internal customers. One of the primary drivers of our group is to enable others to be more awesome, so you’ll improve our existing services, make them scale, make them more reliable. You’ll also build new services when you see an opportunity to help your co-workers.
Work hand-in-hand with our Engineering colleagues. There’s no throwing problems over the wall around here. Everyone brings a different vantage and expertise to the problems we see, expect to over-communicate, and not be afraid to jump on a Hangout or walk down the hall to talk face to face during a problem solving session.
