Staff Infrastructure Engineer, Northbeam

• Cloud Expertise: Solid hands-on experience with GCP (or another major cloud provider) and a knack for automating infrastructure. You should know your way around IAM, VPCs, and compute instances like it’s second nature
• Scripting & Automation: Proficiency in scripting languages like Python and Bash. Extensive experience with IaC tools like Terraform. Basic familiarity with SQL
• Observability Know-How: Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog)
• Networking: SSL Certs, API Gateways, Docker network shenanigans, network segmentation, NGINX configs, VPC Peering, load balancers, proxies… you’ve seen it all
• Problem Solving: A track record of solving complex technical issues, and staying cool under pressure. Outages happen
• Collaboration: Comfortable working cross-functionally with engineering, data, product, and management teams to design and implement solutions that make everyone’s life easier
• Documentation Skills: You can write clear, concise technical documentation that other humans can actually follow

Desirable

• As an Infrastructure Engineer working at Northbeam, you will work with a small engineering team to create a scaleable, observable, reliable platform
• Responsibilities will range widely and evolve, as they tend to at startups
• The following all fall within the Infrastructure team’s remit: CI/CD and dev infrastructure; Security; DR policies; SSL cert management and DNS; Infrastructure as Code; Capacity planning and budgeting; Observability; Scaling plans and automation; Guidance for best use of cloud infrastructure; … and more
• Capacity modeling: Craft a proposal for managing capacity reservations that strikes the perfect balance between savings and flexibility. Bonus points if the CFO and VP of Engineering can tweak your parameters and run simulations themselves while you move on to other pressing tasks
• Optimize the Cloud: Team up with engineering teams to evaluate and upgrade cloud server instances. Automate the upgrade rollout, deal with flapping alerts, improve roll-over automation, fix a few broken windows along the way
• Solve observability puzzles: The eng team wants to move a service to a serverless backend, and pull you in to help figure out how alerts, logs, and deployments should work. Explore options, figure out pros, cons, and costs. Work with the team to discuss the alternatives, and roll out the winner
• Automate All the Things: GCP loves its projects. So many projects. So you automate provisioning GCP projects needed to deal with their per-project limits and various data isolation requirements. Pre-configured services, networking rules, access grants, CI pipelines, the whole deal
• Tame Noisy Alerts: Hunt down the root causes of noisy alerts and tweak configurations so we only hear from the system when it matters. “Just see if it goes away” is not an acceptable reaction to an alert. Not on your watch
• Security Meets Sanity: Work with management to make secure development policies straightforward (read: something people will actually follow). Stay on top of patching, pen-testing, training, the whole shebang
• Chasing Errors Across the Galaxy: Track down the cause of a 500 error across five codebases, two observability platforms, and three legacy servers that seem to exist solely to test your patience
• Scale the Platform: Keep our infrastructure humming as we grow—enhance, maintain, and iterate to keep everything running smoothly
• Write it Down: Create technical documentation that’s useful for engineers, understandable for stakeholders, and not soul-crushing to read
• You won’t do all of this alone - you could, but maybe not all of it at once, plus it’s good for others to know how this stuff works. But you will set the tone, and you will teach, collaborate, and lead by example
• You’ll be a key player in keeping our platform reliable, efficient, and scalable. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll tell stories of yore. If this sounds like your kind of chaos, we’d love to hear from you