Platform Engineer

Position overview

A cloud native application platform automates infrastructure and service  provisioning and configuration, dynamically allocating and reallocating resources at deployment 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.

You will be at the driving seat of the developer experience platform team, by creating a self-serve, seamless and secure journey for Engineering and allowing them for shorter Speed to Market.

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

We rely on the following tools and technologies. 

• Terraform

• AWS (ECS, RDS, SQS, VPC, KMS)

• GCP (Cloud run, Cloud functions, Datastream, BigQuery)

• Docker

• GitHub and GitHub Actions

• Newrelic/PagerDuty

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 by having business incremental deliverables.

• Building a developer journey 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 with stakeholders like Engineering Team, Product and Security, to identify and build a robust, self-serve and scalable framework of automated actions

• Be part of a technical decision group, as your inputs will influence the Platform landscape and roadmap.

• Deliver self-serve capabilities to our developers that allow them to provision, manage and operate their own infrastructure and services deployment..

• Build high quality code into everything we do by following industry best practices and at the same time being able to understand what Xapo needs and make decisions according to it.

• Provide coaching and mentoring to colleagues around how to build sustainable services and automated pipelines.

• 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 good 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 and shaping developer’s environment as code and using pipelines, solid expertise in GitHub and GitHub action is mandatory.

• Ideally is comfortable in a variety of scripting and coding languages.

• Strong knowledge and experience in designing, deploying, and administering complex cloud environments. Preferably AWS or GCP certified and has a good understanding of cloud architecture best practices.

• 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 and the Xapo Values-Driven Leadership principles.