Site Reliability Engineer

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.

The opportunity

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 US or European SRE team and help us level up!

Responsibilities

• 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

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.

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!

About us

At Smart, we're a diverse team, made up of people from different backgrounds, experiences and skills. Our goal is to build great products to help people plan for their financial futures. We’re constantly developing new ideas to help people look after their pension schemes around the world. We’ve grown to a team of over 500 talented people, all dedicated to creating the best experience for our customers. If you think you can help us build a smarter future, come and work with us.

Smart Pension is committed to crafting an inclusive work environment with a diverse workforce. You will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability or age.Our Recruitment Data Policy is here. Please click on the link if you have any questions about how we store your data or to know your rights.

Benefits

• £500 personal training budget to spend on books, courses, conferences or training materials to help you develop.
• Health Insurance (via EquipsMe) including Dental, Eyecare and Employee Assistance Program.
• Death in Service via Unum (4 x Base Salary).
• Season ticket loans.
• 5 week sabbatical after 5 years.
• 25 days holiday per year plus bank holidays. 1 extra day holiday after 2 years and then every year up to a max of 30 days holiday.
• Enhanced maternity and paternity (maternity - 6 months fully paid / paternity - 3 weeks fully paid).
• Access to PerkBox.
• Access to Smart Rewards.
• Pension scheme via salary sacrifice. Smart will match your contributions up to 5% of your salary.
• Cycle to work scheme.
• 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.