WordPress VIP and Parse.ly are part of the Automattic family of brands. Together, we help the world's largest companies (including Facebook, Salesforce, and Disney) create innovative digital experiences with WordPress.
Working in concert with our Data Engineers and Frontend Engineers as an Infrastructure Engineer, you will take ownership of Parse.ly's distributed cloud environment. This environment involves 300+ servers running in 7 availability zones and 2 regions in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It also includes AWS services such as RDS, EMR, ElastiCache, and Athena.
We practice true DevOps: infrastructure-as-code, reliance on automation/scripting, pervasive monitoring/alerting, and close collaboration with application engineering. In this role you will write application code and automate tasks in Python, other scripting languages, and other automation tools. You will master AWS services, security practices, and APIs.
You will ensure that one of the most important real-time analytics systems in the world, trusted daily by thousands of content teams and installed on over 5,000 high-traffic sites, is leveraging the best high-availability and rapid-recovery techniques.
We are a fully distributed team, which means 100% of our engineers, designers, and product managers (including our founders & management team) work out of home offices. This has been true for years, long before the pandemic switched people's work styles -- so we have a thoughtful approach to fully distributed collaboration that has been refined over time.
Most of the product team is located near the US/Eastern time zone. Candidates should be in GMT-7 thru GMT-3, because even though we operate on a distributed/async model, we like to have timezone overlap for f2f (video) collaboration and pairing. If you can regularly make meetings between an 11am-3pm US/Eastern scheduling period, you're in a workable timezone for us. Much of our team is US-based, but we'll also consider other timezone-aligned locations in North America and South America (e.g. Canada, Mexico) for this role.
As an Infrastructure Engineer at Parse.ly, you'll be responsible for:
- Owning all code related to automated build-out of our cloud infrastructure. This includes code to build our EC2 boxes, monitoring/alerting scripts, cost reporting tools, and more. This includes our automation around Ansible and Terraform.
- Evaluating new technologies that assist Parse.ly's data engineering and user experience teams reduce toil through automation. Examples of technologies evaluated in the past (some adopted, some discarded): Datadog APM, Varnish, Docker, Vagrant, AWS ElastiCache, AWS RDS, Logstash, Kibana, Sentry, PgBouncer, GitLab CI.
- Assisting in the rollout of critical services. For example, one of our Infrastructure Engineers recently assisted with the upgrade and migration of our central datastore, containing tens of terabytes and billions of records. This upgrade happened with no customer service interruptions and no server downtime.
- Gaining operational expertise for core data infrastructure technologies, including Amazon S3, Kafka, Zookeeper, Storm, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Redis, Postgres, and Spark.
- Reporting on improvement of key Service-Level Objectives (SLOs) within Parse.ly, such as API response times, service uptime, end-to-end data processing latency, and more.
It’s a major bonus if you have:
- Past experience programming in Python
- Depth of experience with AWS
- Deep love of UNIX/Linux
- Comfort with shell scripting and server automation
- Experience with Terraform and Ansible
- Read all or part of "Site Reliability Engineering" book from Google/O'Reilly (available for free here)
- Past experience working on a "remote-first" or "fully distributed" team
