Senior Site Reliability Engineer

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

THE ROLE

Smart is growing its technology team and as part of our growth, we are looking to hire a Site Reliability Engineer to help us dramatically scale our operations. Are you an opinionated, fast moving engineer with prior SRE or DevOps experience looking to make your dent in the universe? Smart could be your chance!

As a part of the SRE team, you will be expected to assess and jointly deliver improvements to Smart’s observability, reliability, capacity, and developer facing tooling. Are you someone who has a passion for uptime? Are you opinionated on what SRE is and isn’t? Do you know the difference between good and bad instrumentation? We are looking for seasoned engineers to join our UK, Dubai or European SRE team and help us level up!

Responsibilities in this role include:

• Build and configure developer and client facing tooling to improve platform and service observability.
• Reduce manual work (toil) for the technology team -- yourself included! - by implementing appropriate solutions or processes as required.
• Be a security champion within the SRE sphere of responsibility
• Own & support engineering in implementation of monitoring & alerting as we move to a 24/7/365 platform.
• Coach the development team to build and leverage application and platform metrics more effectively.
• Define Service Level Objectives for the Smart Platform, including working with other departments to define appropriate availability targets.
• Keep up to date with best practices in full-stack site reliability
• Assist our Infrastructure team in maintaining our AWS environments
• Own and improve our incident management tooling and integrations
• Update or produce documents to describe changes to the platform

This position includes some limited out of hours on-call after your initial training period, and will be supported by the rest of the engineering team. We cherish work-life balance here at Smart, so this support will be reasonable and compensated.

Requirements

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

The skills, experience and aptitudes we are looking for are listed below. If it all sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.

Please don’t be discouraged from applying if you don’t meet every single one of these criteria – having a ‘can do’ attitude is sometimes more important than being able to tick every box.

Essential:

• Experience supporting platforms (websites and/or APIs) on hyperscale cloud providers (especially AWS) and SaaS products.
• Experience defining appropriate full-stack performance and security metrics to monitor web platforms, and alerting on breaches of those metrics.
• Experience with continuous delivery and working in zero-downtime deploy environments.
• Comfortable with command-line tools and environments. Linux experience is essential.
• Proficient with at least one server-side programming language such as Ruby or Python and with configuration management tools like Terraform or Ansible.
• Enjoys complex problem solving and delivering results.

Helpful:

• Experienced user of SaaS observability tooling, especially DataDog
• Experienced working with or supporting Incident Management tooling (Pagerduty, OpsGenie, etc).
• Experience with container deployment platforms like Kubernetes, and especially AWS EKS.
• 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.