Platform Engineer

Overview

We are looking for an experienced infrastructure engineer who enjoys problem solving, learning, and supporting others.

Salary:  £70k - £95K Reporting to: Andrew Zhao, Cloud Team Lead Location: primarily based in our London Office, with flexible and hybrid working (ideally three days per week in the office).

About us

At VivaCity, we make cities smarter, safer, and more sustainable. We have over 5,000 AI sensors around the world, gathering real-time anonymous data on transport modes, traffic flow, and travel patterns. This is used to gather actionable insights to support strategic decisions to improve the global transport network. 

All our solutions are community-centric, using 'privacy by design' principles. Our ultimate goal is to make the European vision of a Smart City - one which makes the city work effectively, for the community.

We have an open and collaborative culture, intended to maximise innovation while preserving the sense of community that has made VivaCity a fantastic place to work. Read more about what it's like to work at VivaCity.

About the role

You’ll be joining a group of 20 engineers who work across a wide problem space and technology stack, from high-volume cloud computing and full-stack web development to physical hardware, via cutting-edge machine learning research.

This role sits within our Cloud and Infrastructure team (currently a team of six), which is responsible for the development, monitoring, and maintenance of the company’s cloud and on-premise infrastructure, CI processes, company data, internal tooling, information security, and end-user devices. 

This role has a focus on improving the resilience and observability of our cloud infrastructure, and primary responsibility for our Apache Kafka platform. 

You will work closely with other engineers in the Technology department to improve the scalability and reliability of our production services, as well as provide guidance and technical support.

This role is a unique opportunity to work with a wide variety of technologies and tooling, including complex time series data, an in-house data pipeline system written in Go, and kubernetes clusters defined using Infrastructure as Code.

About you

You enjoy problem solving, learning, and supporting others. You thrive on wearing lots of different hats and working in a wide variety of areas. You are capable of taking ownership of tasks and seeing them through to the end, and include tests and documentation in your definition of “done”. 

You communicate clearly and effectively so that others understand what they can expect from you, and when they can expect it. You continue working on problems, even when you are not familiar with the problem space, and you know when and how to ask for help.

Your day-to-day tasks will include

• Improving performance and efficiency of our data, primarily focusing on our core Kafka Strimzi instances.. (30%)
• Responding to incidents when they occur, informing stakeholders appropriately. (20%)
• Improving and maintaining our monitoring and alerting systems. (15%)
• Being a documentation champion. (15%)
• Using your expertise to unblock developers and improve developer experience. (10%)
• Identifying areas of inefficiency, and proposing, planning, and implementing solutions. (10%)

Requirements for the role

• Strong knowledge of Apache Kafka (ideally Kafka Strimzi), including broker management, upgrade and scaling and integration with data pipelines (our pipelines are written in Golang and configured via yaml config maps).
• Problem solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Knowledge of Unix systems, ideally Linux (we mostly use Ubuntu).
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure (we use Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform).
• Experience writing technical or process documentation

The following would further strengthen an application

• Proficiency with Hashicorp Vault including secret and role management.
• Proficiency with PostgreSQL (we use TimescaleDB), including query optimisation and SQL proficiency.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages (we primarily use Go and TypeScript).
• Proficiency in one or more scripting languages (we primarily use Bash and Python).
• Comfortable working with Infrastructure as Code, ideally Terraform.
• Familiarity with common DevOps tools and CI/CD processes.
• Experience of operationally managing software components, including observability, logging, metrics, error reporting, debugging, and live incident management.
• Proficiency with infrastructure management tools (e.g. Ansible, Chef, Puppet)
• Experience with internal developer platforms.
• Familiarity with data pipelines.
• Knowledge of information security principles, including identity and access management and authentication/authorisation processes.
• Experience in a start-up or scale-up environment.

You don't need to have done all of these things before, but to excel in this role, you will need to be keen to learn and comfortable working in a dynamic, fast-paced environment. If you're close to what we're looking for, please consider applying. Experience comes in many forms, skills are transferable, and passion goes a long way. Hiring process

• 30 minute screening interview.
• 90 minute problem solving interview where you work together with a VivaCity engineer to solve a problem.
• 75 minute final round interview, split into a 45 minute scenario-based soft skills interview, and a 30 minute conversation with Anna, our CTO.

We know that diverse ideas and perspectives drive innovation and make us better. We are creating an environment where everyone, from any background, can do their best work. We're an equal opportunities employer and all applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, nationality, disability, age, or social background. If you need any reasonable accommodations to help you perform at your best during the application process, please let us know. What We Offer

• 25 days of holiday
• Flexible working hours and work from home
• Up to 30 days per year work from abroad
• Up to 3 flexible bank holiday days
• £200 total working from home budget
• £850 per year learning and development budget
• Enhanced parental leave
• Up to 3 ‘childcare’ or ‘dependant’ days per year
• Mental health support through Spill
• Discounted gym memberships through GymFlex
• £50 per person per quarter team social budget
• Additional entertainment budget and company parties
• Office food and drinks
• Optional Bupa healthcare and dental care through salary deduction
• Eye care vouchers
• Seasonal Flu jabs
• Cycle to work scheme
• Payroll giving through salary sacrifice