Senior Systems Engineer (Remote)

About the job

We’re building a different kind of IT company, one that meets our customers and our own team on their turf, on their terms. We’re growing fast right now and you can be part of it with all the opportunities to add value that come with that. Curious? Great! That’s what we like in a Softie! Our Softies are a diverse and globally distributed team that are on a mission to change the future of data infrastructure with task-specific hardware and open source. We aim to do all the hard work so that our customers can adopt the best open source has to offer in a bulletproof and resilient way. Our team thinks differently, working as an integrated but globally dispersed team of experts in hardware manufacturing, firmware, software, infrastructure and everything in between.

We’re looking to recruit Linux systems engineers into our Product Engineering team, to drive new initiatives that accelerate our customer projects and bolster our product definition work. You’ll be working in a cross functional team alongside our software and platform engineering teams and our commercial teams.

Product Engineering works on quick-turnaround new technology projects to demonstrate advanced usage of our cloud appliances and make it easy for our partners, systems team, and our customers to deploy similar solutions. This can consist of first-time technology deployment/testing, operating production infrastructure, performance benchmarking and open-source software development. We aim to automate and document everything we do, to ensure it can be easily consumed by others, both internally and by our channel partners and customers. Examples of recent projects include containerisation, infrastructure as code, and observability.

As part of this role, you will be driving:

• Proof of concept projects with industry partners, which integrate with our product lines.
• Operation of production cloud-native infrastructure in a range of different environments.
• Creation and maintenance of new and existing technical documentation that is both internally and externally-facing.
• Designing and proving out new customer-specific solutions alongside our solutions architecture team.
• Mentoring new colleagues as they get to grips with our technology stack and build their skills - both technical and otherwise.

You will be working with our next generation hardware in our engineering labs around the world, building Linux infrastructure, and running performance testing. You should apply if you have:

• 5+ years experience in a technical role, ideally building and maintaining infrastructure.
• Fluency with Linux systems.
• Fluency with Git and version control.
• Programming experience with Python, Go, Java, or C.
• Experience with infrastructure automation (Salt/Ansible/Chef/Puppet).
• Excellent proficiency in English, and a discipline of writing well-written and meticulous technical documentation as you work.

Ideally you might also have experience with one or two of the below:

• Experience with IaC software (Terraform/Docker Machine /CloudFormation).
• Open Source Storage, particularly Ceph, but also underlying technologies eg. LVM, ZFS.
• Open Source Virtualisation eg. Libvirt, OpenStack, Cloudstack, OpenNebula.
• Kubernetes deployment and operation.
• Contributions to open source projects.

Benefits

We pay competitively in the market in which you want to be located, and provide an attractive benefits package including significant share options in our fast growing, mid-stage start-up.

Location

You tell us! This role gives you the freedom to live and work where you can be at your best. We operate globally and also have some pretty cool offices worldwide. Time travel (aka time zone optimisation) is one of our super powers and we use this to our best advantage in setting up teams and how we work. This role can be based remotely in the US or UK, or in one of our offices there, or a hybrid.

Recruitment agencies

We work with like-minded companies across all of our business. We’re not into vendor lock-in of any type, we don’t do the hard sell and we treat time and attention as valuable resources. Recruitment agents, please don’t send us unsolicited resumes or CVs unless we’ve asked you to work with us on the role - it just shows us you’re not our type.