Lead DevOps Engineer

When we say we’re looking for “a devops”, we faintly hear the devops guild tut-tut in the background. “Devops is not a job title, you can’t hire a devops, what’s a devops, even?” After the tut-tutting comes the teaching: “Devops is a frame of mind, an ongoing desire in the whole dev team to work together across dev and operations roles in times of continuous deployment. It’s an attitude much more than a skill.”

Well, that’s what we want! We don't want silos in our dev team, we’re looking for somebody who wants to work very closely with our devs. She or he is a sysadmin at heart, but that heart is big enough to care about the plight of our developers, forking and committing and deploying like there’s no tomorrow.

The reason our devs do that, is not because they have a burning desire to break things. It’s because there is a tomorrow, a big tomorrow. A tomorrow where people in financial services all over the world find that one platform especially built for them to automate their work. We’re in a niche, but a huge niche, and one where Silverfin is hotter than a hot potato straight of a midsummer beach bbq.

Our current infrastructure

A classic Rails stack, managed with Cloud66, consisting of:

• A load balancer
• Several unicorn web servers
• Several sidekiq background workers
• A redis cache server
• A Postgresql master and slave

Our next infrastructure

That’s your job. You’ll be responsible for designing and implementing an infrastructure that’s highly available, fast, scalable and manageable. Although most of our devs have experience deploying small and simple Rails apps, none of us have done it at the scale Silverfin has reached. You’ll decide which technology to use for automating our infrastructure setup, configuration, management and deployments.

Besides owning our infrastructure, you’ll also help our devs define the architecture of our continuously growing application, as well as plan and orchestrate complex migrations and updates.

Our challenges

• Users are growing exponentially, and so is our dev team.
• Developers deploy our app multiple times per day.
• We store over 1TB of data in Postgres, growing at 100GB/month. One table is over 3B rows long.
• We’ve processed over 1 billion background jobs in sidekiq.
• Users can implement their own business logic in a custom liquid-based templating language.

Requirements

• You have experience setting up a zero downtime deployment system for a typical web application
• You love automating things
• You use the right tools for the job (which could be Ansible, Chef, Terraform, Kubernetes or …)

Nice to have, but not required

• You like immutable infrastructure
• You like your infrastructure to be stored under version control
• You have experience scaling Postgresql
• You’ve deployed Rails apps
• You’ve written Ruby code
• You use containers and can make the call when (not) to use them
• You’ve used container orchestration

What we offer

• A competitive salary with extra benefits
• The opportunity to work for an exciting company with a large international customer base
• The opportunity to (fully) work remote
• A stimulating working environment with passionate colleagues
• Dev retreats twice a year (Berlin, Lisbon, …)
• (if working from Gent) Endless supply of excellent coffee, fresh fruit and... cocktails on Friday