Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Expel
$167.3-242.6k
+ Bonus eligibility + Equity
Cyber security threat detection & management
Be an early applicant
Cyber security threat detection & management
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$167.3-242.6k
+ Bonus eligibility + Equity
501-1000 employees
Company mission
Expel is on a mission to make security easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to continuously improve.
Role
Who you are
- Your passion for uptime was forged from experience in production and refined through incident response
- You’re an Expel Principal Site Reliability Engineer - a protector, champion, and leader of Expel's reputation for service reliability
- Innovation comes naturally to you, but you're also eager to help others
- You understand that operational reliability is a shared mission across all of engineering, and that your role is to make it as easy as possible for Expel to achieve that mission
- You spend your mornings collaborating with architects and product stakeholders to outline the next quarter’s reliability initiatives, then the afternoon pair-programming with a junior SRE to mentor them in debugging a tricky Kubernetes deployment
- You apply your dedication to reliability and collaboration with the broader SRE community to ensure Expel maintains outstanding reliability standards within the cloud native ecosystem
- You take pride in all the nines of uptime you’ve achieved, but you know that an SRE’s job is never done!
- A passion for learning and improving your work product
- Significant experience operating Kubernetes within highly distributed environments
- Experience running systems in GCP or AWS
- Exposure to monitoring and observability infrastructure and standard methodologies
- An understanding of infrastructure-as-code practices, tools, and patterns
- Some experience developing software in Linux environments, preferably with Python and/or Golang
- A customer-minded approach that enables the success of platform users as well as building trust across the organization
- A collaborative disposition that allows you to work optimally on and across teams
- Six years of systems experience either in operations or development
- Missing some items on the list? That's ok! We still want to talk to you!
What the job involves
- Provide an opportunity to grow and maintain reliability-focused platform features within a cloud native engineering platform using modern infrastructure and tooling (Kubernetes/GKE/EKS runtime, Hashicorp toolset, etc)
- Provide you a mission you can get behind: stopping evil hackers so our customers can focus on their business
- Be included in a company focused on creating opportunities to do interesting work and creating space for employees to learn and grow
- An opportunity to contribute to a best-in-class product
- A leadership team that’s embraced modern Site Reliability principles, as outlined by Google and other industry leaders
- Lead project work to build and maintain platform features that cut across the Expel product’s reliability, networking, and cloud infrastructure
- Contribute by pushing IaC commits daily, with occasional opportunities to write and test application code in Python, Golang, and Javascript
- Mentor and motivate service owners on how to use the platform in order to deploy, measure, monitor, and operate their own services at scale
- Participate in a weekly support rotation that includes taking the on-call pager and providing nearly on-demand working-hours support to platform users
- Lead incident response, triage, and root cause analysis support
- Poke fun at our leadership team in creative ways
- We build and run teams where everyone is pulling in the same direction and is learning from each other:
- We work out of a shared backlog
- We pair-program weekly, as it makes sense
- We peer-review everything
- We do weekly blame-free retros to reinforce what’s going well, so we do more of it, and surface what’s not going well, so we can do something about it. Same thing for projects and significant operational problems
Application process
- We respect your time. You’ll hear from us by the end of the next business day after completing an interview
- We also have a goal that all Expletives have a great manager and have a voice in how their team is run and who runs it
- It’s not the shortest process in the industry, but you’ll get to meet nearly everyone you’ll work with day-to-day and your Engineering leadership
- New Expletives consistently say our interview process gave them an accurate picture of what it’s like to work here
- Here’s our 3-stage process for this position (5.5 hours total interviewing time):
- Chat with a recruiter (30 min)
- Video interview with hiring manager (Engineering Manager) (60 minutes)
- Pair programming interview (with two engineers) (60 minutes)
- “Virtual onsite interview” (can be scheduled contiguous or broken up, 60 minutes each):
- Engineering leadership (Engineering Director and Manager of Delivery Experience)
- System design interview (with two engineers)
- Technology and skills interview (with two engineers)
Our take
As ransomware and hacking threats rise, identifying and resolving breaches in security must be done quickly. Lack of transparency in cyber-security makes it difficult for engineers to detect, understand, and fix the issues as fast as possible. Expel is aiming to redefine what a security operations center and managed detection service looks like in the modern age.
Though the company faces competition from the vast number of cybersecurity platforms, Expel positions itself as a viable alternative to the service delivery model of managed security service providers (MSSPs) by offering a comprehensive management platform that connects to its customers’ tech remotely through APIs, providing fast detection and clear solutions.
Having reached unicorn status, the company is establishing a stronger presence in the European and Asia-Pacific markets, capturing business in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore. Its 2022 funding is being used to accelerate sustainable growth, continue the company's international expansion, and push forward with go-to-market initiatives.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
17% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Oct 2022
$31m
SERIES E
Nov 2021
$140.3m
SERIES E
Total funding: $288.8m
Company benefits
- Flexible work hours and locations
- Unlimited time off - includes vacation, personal days, and an annual company-wide restorative day
- 24 weeks parental leave when you, your spouse or your domestic partner gives birth to a child, adopts a child or becomes a foster parent (first 12 weeks paid)
- Military leave
- Paid annual conference - we reimburse you up to $2,500 to attend at least one conference every year that helps you move your career forward
- One month sabbatical after hitting your 5 year anniversary
- Zero-meetings week each quarter - where all Expletives are challenged to reduce the number of internal meetings on their calendar all the way to zero
- Medical insurance through the Cigna Open Access Plus HRA plan
- Dental & vision insurance through Guardian
- Team touchdowns - Expel Teams are encouraged to come together quarterly for planning, for connecting, for energizing and maybe a little fun
- Fitness stipend
- Cell phone stipend
- Employee Assistance Program
- Telemedicine (Cigna’s Telehealth Connection)
- Access to the popular mental health platforms, Ginger and Talkspace
- BenefitHub - a web portal where Expel employees can enjoy discounts, cash back rewards and perks on thousands of brands in a variety of categories!
- Retirement 401(k) account provided by Principal
- Health Reimbursement Arrangement (Cigna)
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Student loan refinancing
Company HQ
Herndon, VA
Leadership
Dave Merkel
(CEO & Co-Founder)Previous CTO of both FireEye and Mandiant (also VP, Products and Threat Management Services). Previously worked as the Senior Technical Director at America Online and for the US Air Force as an Assistant Chief of Intrusion Invasions.
Justin Bajko
(VP of Strategy & Business Development & Co-Founder)Previous Managing Director (MCIRT Operations) at Mandiant and Senior Manager of Global Security Analysis at Symantec. Previously worked as a Network Administrator at Clinical Trial Management Services, and was a Network and Systems Administrator at MiniFibers.
Yanek Korff
(Chief of Staff & Co-Founder)Previous COO at Expel. Current Board Member at ThreatSwitch and Investor at Berg Capital Group. Previous Member of the Technical Advisory Board at Ntrepid Corp and CP an CTO at FireEye.
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