SRE/Platform Engineer

Key Skills

Aartificial intelligence, API, AWS, DevOps, Effective communication skills, Git, Github, GPUs, Lambda, MLOps tools, MongoDB, Node.js, Operations, Python Programming, SaaS

Job Description

We’re looking for a seasoned engineer with a strong SRE or Platform Engineering focus to join our team support our product engineering teams.

Today we’re a small team who all get stuck in, but we’re structuring our work so that as we scale people have a natural alignment to a future team structure.

What does that really mean? When you join you’ll focus on a type of work (SRE, Platform Engineering or Developer Experience) with an 80/20 split on your area and everything else. We’ve written about this recently on LinkedIn.

We are looking for people who have been though the scale-up process before. We’re a Product organisation of 50, having more than doubled in the last year. During that time we’ve close to 10x’d our transaction rate. We expect to see similar growth over the next few years.

We’re not just a SaaS product running high-volume CRUD type transactions, we also have long-running, resource intensive AI workloads, both training and inference, at scale. We work closely with teams in Product Engineering, AI R&D, MLOps and Security.

Key responsibilities

As a member of the team you will…

• Work with engineering teams to design, evolve and run high-volume, customer facing systems, both new and existing, including those which aren’t sticking to our golden path supported by Platform Engineering.
• Deliver projects which expand the capabilities of our shared platform. This includes everything from Source Code management and Service Patterns, through Build and Deploy, right though Container Orchestration and finishes with our Metrics and Alerting systems. We aim to provide a Golden Path for Engineers that makes them happy, productive and efficient.
• Being a member of our on-call rota, which may include working out of hours. We have a one week rotation, swapping on a Tuesday, managed by PagerDuty, with the team lead being available for escalation at all times and in the on-call rota themselves.
• You will not have any direct reports, but will play a part in development and support of your peers. Your role could evolve into a Team Lead if that is the way you want to take it in the future.

We are looking for somebody who:

• Has been though the Scale Up phase of a business (300 to 1000 employees or equivalent), seeing product and company numbers increase significantly, and someone who played a important role in making that successful.
• Can self-manage and deliver multiple projects as part of a quarterly planning cycle within a team.
• Is an excellent communicator and can partner with engineers to solve both structural/systemic problems and those which are time critical (live operations).
• Can work with clarity when under pressure during operational incidents
• Enjoys helping others achieve their goals though collaboration; DevOps is a culture not a team name (but yes, it’s our team name right now).
• Has extensive experience running and debugging customer facing Production systems, in a SaaS environment, at scale.
• Has extensive experience working with containers, orchestrators and autoscaling/self-healing/low operations systems.

We use a wide range of technologies, and we can’t all be experts in all of them, so if you don’t hit every box on this list, we’d still encourage you to apply.

Our current stack includes:

• AWS: We have a strong focus on ECS today, but also have the AWS serverless stack (APIGateway, Lambda, Fargate) in our world. We’re very interested in people with strong Kubernetes experience (EKS).
• Services built in Python and NodeJS.
• TerraGrunt and Terraform for infrastructure as code.
• A lot of GPUs. We’re very interested in the people with the intersection of CloudNative+GPU+High workloads.
• MongoDB Atlas. We’re very interested in people with strong Mongo experience.
• Github Actions for build and deploy tooling..
• Git for version control.

At Synthesia we expect everyone to:

• Be an owner.
• Focus on outcomes over inputs and plans.
• Make the journey fun
• Default to simple. 

You can read more about this in this public Notion page: https://synthesia.notion.site/How-we-work-at-Synthesia-f794caa72f8446efb6be22b551ce0fa2 

You can expect in return...

 A competitive salary + stock options in our fast growing Series C start-up.

 A remote-friendly environment. We expect occasional travel (1x per quarter) for quarterly planning/retrospectives to one of our European hubs. You're welcome to work out of our offices in London, Copenhagen, Munich, or Amsterdam, too. 

 25 days of annual leave + public holidays in the country where you are based. 

 Regular socials and company retreats.

 4 weeks paid sabbatical after 4 years at the company + $10,000 USD.

 A generous referral scheme.

 A brand new computer of your choice and the equipment you need to get your work done

 A huge opportunity for career growth as you’ll help shape a market-defining product.

+ Other country-specific benefits based on the country you are hired in such as private healthcare & a pension.