Infrastructure Tech Lead

At Smart, our mission is to transform retirement, savings and financial wellbeing, across all generations, around the world.

THE ROLE

Are you someone who has a passion for DevOp, Infrastructure as Code, and is looking to lead a team in helping own our platform and scale the level of operations that we provide

Being part of a small, but growing Infrastructure team, supporting the larger Engineering organization.

Are you a passionate individual with prior SRE or DevOps experienced, looking to lead a team and craft the future of the Infrastructure roadmap at Smart Pension for years to come?

As this is a senior role, you will be expected to own and be accountable for the reliability, security, scalability and deployment of the platform - and what your team does!

Responsibilities in this role include:

• Lead a team of up to 8 Infrastructure Engineers (some line management duties required!)
• Manage your team's backlog - understand the priorities of work and what business value they unlock
• Provide backlog progress updates to stakeholders within the company
• Manage, maintain & support our AWS and (legacy) Heroku environments.
• Build appropriate tooling for development teams & clients.
• Reduce manual work (toil) for the technology team -- yourself included! - by implementing appropriate solutions or processes as required.
• Design & implement improved data security strategies for our platform.
• Own & implement appropriate monitoring & alerting as we move to a 24/7/365 platform.
• Assist the development team in using these metrics to ensure the reliability of our platform remains excellent across all deployments.
• Define Service Level Objectives for the Smart Platform, including working with other departments to define appropriate availability targets.
• Own & implement new continuous deployment & release improvements to support Smart's ambitious future plans, including deployment to secured third-party environments for a variety of different clients.
• Keep up to date with best practices in application hosting and continuous deployment.
• Update or produce documents to describe changes to the platform.

Requirements

Who you are

• Proven track record of supporting web platforms (e.g. websites or API’s) in production at scale.
• Experience in cloud platforms to upgrade and fix.
• Experience defining appropriate metrics to monitor web platforms, and alerting on breaches of those metrics.
• Ability to monitor and identify network policy violations and system breaches.
• Experience with incident response in an on-call environment.
• Experience with continuous delivery and zero-downtime deployments.
• Experience with AWS, MySQL, and Redis (or similar platforms).
• Comfortable with command-line tools and environments. Linux experience is essential.
• Experience with configuration management tools like Terraform or Ansible, and understand their common use cases.
• Enjoys complex problem solving and delivering results.

Bonus points

• Familiarity with Heroku or Heroku-like PaaS.
• Familiarity with Amazon Aurora.
• Experience with container deployment platforms like Kubernetes.
• Experience with Docker & Containerisation.
• Prior evidence of developing command-line tools.
• Experience with Serverless technologies e.g. AWS Lambda

WHO WE ARE

We work in partnerships with governments and financial institutions in the UK and internationally. Our cloud-native digital platform is revolutionising how people around the world think about, and save for, their retirement. We offer a pension with sustainable investment options and a net zero target of 2040. Net zero refers to equalling the amount of greenhouse gases produced and the amount removed from the atmosphere through the investments we make.

At heart, we’re a financial technology business. What we do is all about innovation, and using the power of digital change to put the customer first. Our Engineers will tell you that working at Smart gives you the opportunity to play your part in developing world-class technological solutions, working with – and learning from – like-minded people.

You’ll also find that, across our business, our colleagues love Smart’s culture, and how what we do means better financial outcomes for savers. That feels worthwhile, and it means that what we do, collectively, goes way beyond the nine to five of a typical working day.

Don’t just take our word for it – you can see what our colleagues say about working at Smart on the Great Place To Work website, Linkedin Life and Glassdoor.

Engineering at Smart

At Smart, we build working software that always works - and we do it fast! We’ve managed to thread the needle between speed and reliability, with double digit daily deploys into production and an exceptionally low rate of failure. Smart is disrupting an industry that has been particularly slow to adopt new technology. As a tech company (in culture, tools, and people) that does pensions, we’re uniquely positioned to shake things up!

We have the benefit of having adopted many engineering best practices from day 1. Our approach to code is simple: keep it small, clean, and ensure it has thorough test coverage. We don't ship code just to hit a deadline. Pensions are a long game. We're handling peoples retirement income, so the stability, security and accuracy of our platform is everything. But we also recognise that being able to deliver change and innovation at pace are our secret sauce!

Some interesting notes on the way we work:

Tech check! We use AWS, GitHub, Semaphore CI, Datadog, Docker, and Kubernetes, to name a few.

We are able to maintain at least 96% test coverage of our application through collaboration and strong code review practices, meaning we can focus on features rather than bug fixing.

Our team is passionate about OOP, TDD and DDD.

We ship software continuously, releasing new features to production up to 30 times a day.

We follow Agile practices and have a strong DevOps culture in place.

We have great internal mobility, meaning that we are able to give you exposure to the aspects that you would like to improve on or learn about. Progression and development are key, and we really invest in education!

We believe in diversity and inclusion, in and out. We have a diverse engineering workforce and over 80% of our Engineering team volunteered their time to be coaches at the recent Rails Girls London event – a free workshop aimed at making technology more approachable for women.

We empower our engineers to propose new ideas. For instance, we run hackathons where in 24 hours anyone can build and present new ways of thinking to the senior management team – most of these ideas wind up being implemented and put into production.

Benefits

At Smart, one of the eight principles we work to is “We want happy and good people in our team”. We created a list of benefits that helps us achieve this goal:

• 25 days’ holiday per year, increasing with length of service.
• £500 annual training budget to spend on your professional development
• Extensive private healthcare, including dental, eyecare and EAP
• Enhanced sick leave (three months’ pay per year)
• Enhanced maternity and paternity (maternity – 6 months fully paid/paternity – 3 weeks fully paid)
• Death in service insurance cover
• Fully-paid five-week sabbatical after five years of employment
• In office wellbeing, such as manicures, massages and barbers. We also serve free lunch, breakfasts and social drinks weekly.
• Smart employees also enjoy a 50% discount on orders from our sister company Arena Flowers, Britain's most ethical florist. They offer unique hand-tied bouquets, luxury flowers, letterbox flowers, plants and gifts to spend on friends and loved ones or even for yourself.

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We think Smart is an awesome place to work. If it sounds like somewhere you’d like to work, too, and if you’re ready to play your part in our continued success in the future, then naturally we’d love to meet you.

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