Principal Platform Engineer

Join a team dedicated to creating platforms for products people love as a Remote Principal Platform Engineer!

In this role, you will work directly with our leadership team to build our platform for rapid, developer-friendly cloud deployments. You’ll deliver high-quality, well-tested platforms, mentor both client and thoughtbot engineering teams in best practices, and advise on product prioritization, agile process, and communication.

A Principal Platform Engineer at thoughtbot contributes to our platforms and the development practices of thoughtbot and our community (take a look at our public AWS platform guide), while working on client projects. They will also mentor other thoughtbot engineers, but it is a non-management position. This role is ideal for someone who has made significant higher level contributions to the Platform Engineering and Devops capabilities of current and past companies, and wants to continue to do so without having to take on the responsibility of directly managing other engineers.

During investment time, you'll contribute to the broader tech community, thoughtbot, and yourself. The majority of thoughtbot's open-source work and blog content is the result of investment time.

thoughtbot is a remote company. This is a fully-remote, full-time position. We're looking for teammates who overlap with our clients' working hours. This position is available to anyone throughout the Americas located in time zones UTC-3 through UTC-8.

We are committed to ensuring a representative applicant pool before we begin reviewing applications.

Applications will be reviewed no sooner than July 31, 2023. Our process consists of three interviews, each stage lasting approximately two weeks. The earliest date we would expect to extend an offer would be September 13, 2023.

Salary and benefits vary by location. We publish all our salary ranges in our compensation calculator. New team members typically have a starting salary between the start and the middle of the band. Please view the compensation range and benefits for where you live here.

We believe that it is possible to continuously learn and improve the way people work while building higher-quality products that make positive contributions to the world. We work with companies in every step of the product development and maintenance process to help identify and solve problems. We lead and participate in product design sprints, build high-quality apps, and then deploy them.

We proactively work on improving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at thoughtbot. We aim to maintain an inclusive work environment where everyone can thrive professionally, as well as have full lives outside of work. Read about our DEI efforts in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion section of our Playbook. We acknowledge that DEI work is never done and that we will make mistakes along the way. We are continuously working on learning, and improving ourselves, and the company.

As a member of thoughtbot, you’ll be part of our distributed remote community. We’re continuously working to assure remote work is inclusive, collaborative, comfortable, and social.

Want to dig deeper? Read more about our Purpose and Values, and how we work in our Playbook.

Requirements

The Principal Platform Engineer role at thoughtbot Mission Control brings together a broad understanding of, and experience with, tools and technologies, security training and testing expertise, and people skills (collaboration and flexibility). In addition to required technical skills, you must have experience leading projects and sharing knowledge through mentoring, writing blogs, giving talks or otherwise, and you must value diversity, equity and inclusion, and contributing to an inclusive working and learning environment.

As a Platform Engineer at thoughtbot you will:

• Build and manage Infrastructure using Terraform.
• Build and maintain AWS and Kubernetes environments
• Design and implement continuous integration and deployment pipelines
• Design and build scalable cloud services and architectures
• Improve our testing and security capabilities
• Mentor and collaborate with Platform team members as well as all of thoughtbot
• Value quality, trust, continuous improvement, and self-management.
• Take on “Pager Duties” on a rotating schedule.

Well-qualified candidates will have:

• 5+ years of experience working in a Platform Engineering/Devops/SRE role
• 5+ years of experience deploying to AWS
• 5+ years of experience with Kubernetes
• Previous experience building and deploying applications in Ruby, Python or Javascript
• A passion for open source
• Ability to take a functioning application running in a local environment and work with product leads to production in AWS or Kubernetes
• Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture
• Experience designing and building CI/CD Pipelines
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills
• Keenness to familiarize yourself with new environments and a preference to work a wide range of projects
• Experience in data engineering
• Experience in a consulting setting

We especially appreciate candidates that demonstrate commitment to valuing DEI and contributing to an inclusive working and learning environment. We also understand that not everyone has had the opportunity to commit to this work, and that’s okay.

We encourage you to apply even if you don’t match 100% of the requirements. Let us know if you need any specific accommodations during the interview process.

thoughtbot cannot sponsor work visas at this time.

Benefits

Benefits vary by location, but all team members accrue at least 20 paid annual leave/vacation days per year and receive paid holidays and paid sick days. thoughtbot ensures at least 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave for birthing parents, and at least 6 weeks of fully paid parental leave for non-birthing parents. All new parents have the ability to take up to at least 6 months off by combining different types of leaves. In addition to country-specific benefits, all team members receive a monthly remote work stipend to offset the cost of internet, electricity, etc., and a remote workspace budget to setup their workspace. Please see our benefits page to learn more about benefits for team members located in your country.

Our team works in a relaxed and educational environment to develop excellent products for our clients. We work a sustainable pace of 40 hours/week. We also reserve at least 4 weeks per year for investing in ourselves, the company, and our community. Everything we do is predicated on having a great team and a culture of growth. We use the latest technologies and are always down to try new methods on both internal and client projects.

thoughtbot does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits.

thoughtbot does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than directly from a candidate. Any unsolicited resumes not originating directly from a candidate and sent to thoughtbot or any thoughtbot's employees, including unsolicited resumes sent to a thoughtbot mailing address or email address, are rejected. thoughtbot will NOT pay a fee for any placement resulting from the receipt of an unsolicited resume. thoughtbot considers any candidate for whom the recruiter has submitted an unsolicited resume referred by the company free of any fees.

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