Senior DevOps/SRE Engineer

Who we are and what we do

Despite the name, we’re not a bank. We’re building productivity and advisory tools for small businesses and accountants. We managed to keep the business growth during the pandemic and plan to pick up the pace this year.

We have a very strong dev team entirely located in Bulgaria, which has always been fully remote. We have people in Sofia, Plovdiv, Burgas, Varna, Veliko Tarnovo and others, and have built a solid remote working culture over the years.

We're proud of the way we work and of our values – we care deeply about quality and sane development practices. We also strive for simplicity and pragmatism.

Architecture & stack

We’re managing a few dozen web apps – both internal, API-only projects, as well as a few client-facing ones. Most are written in Ruby and use Rails. We also have a few Python-based machine learning services. All of our databases are PostgreSQL. The biggest app gets about 10 million requests per day, excluding static assets.

We’re hosted entirely in AWS. All machines run on Ubuntu. We use Terraform and Ansible to manipulate our infrastructure, rely on Jenkins for CI/CD, use Docker for packaging and delivery of apps, and Kubernetes to run the apps from the Docker images. All Kubernetes clusters we run are fully managed by us. We are gradually migrating production workloads there.

Team, challenges & you

Our Ops/SRE team currently consists of a few devs, a few ops/sysadmin guys, two DBAs and a security engineer. We’re responsible for making sure all services are up, for keeping our infrastructure costs from going crazy, for providing our colleagues with convenient tools to deliver changes more efficiently, for evolving the infrastructure to match the needs of the business and for refactoring the legacy we’ve created during our rapid growth over the past years.

Our backlog has grown along with the business and the engineering team and we need more heads and hands to help us out. This is where you come in!

We're looking for someone with a solid foundation in software and web development, with experience and interest in all things infrastructure – someone who's interested in how things work under the hood and who's passionate about rock-solid, highly-available and at the same time cost-optimised architecture. Someone who's not afraid of debugging hairy issues and who's always curious to learn more. Someone who values simple and clean solutions but also understands and makes tradeoffs between the simplicity of the architecture and necessary functionality when necessary.

What you'll do if you join our team

You’ll do what all of us in the ops/SRE team do – in no particular order:

• Design, test, implement and provision new services and ops/infrastructure solutions.
• Do experiments and proofs-of-concept to find the best solution to a problem, optimising for reliability, observability, security, ease of maintenance, developer UX and cost-efficiency.
• Work closely with the dev team on anything that is infrastructure-related.
• Automate repetitive tasks and help improve the experience of fellow engineers from the dev team.
• Refactor legacy app code and infrastructure, reduce inconsistencies, introduce conventions.
• Debug hairy app infrastructure issues – learn from that, share the knowledge, improve the underlying architecture.
• Learn and spread your knowledge through pairing sessions, documentation, internal blog posts, mentoring, coaching.

Requirements

Our expectations:

• You're proficient and productive in at least one programming language, potentially a scripting one.
• You are comfortable working with Linux/Unix OSes and know a few Bash tricks.
• You have experience with ops work – deploying apps, making sure they work, then debugging and fixing them when they break.
• You like it when things are neat and tidy but you don’t cringe in the face of a muddy legacy codebase – instead, you roll up your sleeves and start shovelling.
• Security is a paramount concern for you.
• You like problem-solving and getting to the bottom of an issue.
• You know everything breaks and you design systems with that in mind.
• You have a desire to learn and get better at creating scalable, highly available and cost-efficient architectures.
• You’ll be happy helping colleagues with their infrastructure-related questions or issues and you’ll be working to not only expand but also share your knowledge with the team.
• You’re diligent, constructive, with attention to detail, have strong communication skills and can freely express yourself in English – in both speaking and writing.
  
  
  

These will be considered as a plus:

• Experience with web development and all of its quirks, especially with high-volume or high-traffic websites. We're more interested in the backend portion, but some frontend experience will always come in handy.
• Decent knowledge of Ruby, Python, or another scripting language.
• Experience with Rails will be very valuable, given that almost all of our apps are using Rails.
• Experience with SQL and managing relational databases, especially PostgreSQL.
• Experience with Docker or another containerisation technology – almost all of our apps is packaged as Docker images. Understanding how Docker and containerisation work under the hood will be very useful.
• Experience with Kubernetes or another orchestration solution.
• Experience with working in the cloud, especially with AWS.
• Experience with Golang will be of great use as 90% of all infra tools we use are written in Go, including Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Packer, Vault, Prometheus, Grafana and so on.
• Networking knowledge and experience are always indispensable.
• Linux Debugging experience – using tools like tcpdump, strace, iostat, netstat, lsof, or directly inspecting /proc – always handy! In any case, you'll learn to use and love these tools.
• Experience with Ansible and/or the Hashicorp stack – Terraform, Packer, Vault.
• Experience with the ELK stack, Jenkins, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana – we use all of these extensively and knowing them upfront will make your life easier.

Benefits

Remote work is now the norm. The difference is that we've been fully remote for many years now, and know how to properly work remotely.

Additional benefits for our Bulgaria-based team include an employer-paid additional medical insurance, life and risk insurance, and 25-days of paid annual leave. When there's no pandemic, the team gets together for monthly team drinks and an off-site somewhere beautiful twice a year. We hope to resume these activities as soon as the situation permits.

We also supply you with a company Mac or a PC laptop.

We strive for quality and a stress-free work environment. We want our colleagues to learn and grow. We’ll be happy to have a like-minded person join us!

About Receipt Bank

The Receipt Bank Group was founded in 2010 and has been revolutionising bookkeeping ever since. With over 6,000 partner firms worldwide, we maintain a growth rate of 100%+ year-on-year. We are a global company with a team of 450+ in offices in London, Washington DC, Sydney, Sofia, Paris, Toronto and Cape Town – and that list is only looking to get longer.

Work smarter. Grow faster. Go further. Join Receipt Bank.