Platform Engineer - (100% remote)

The Basics

We are looking for a Platform Engineer (m/f/d). You will be a key member of a tight-knit group of talented Engineers who are responsible for building the Giant Swarm Developer Platform. The specific team is using cutting-edge technologies including Kubernetes operators and Cluster API to realize the platform’s cluster management and scaling capabilities on AWS and Azure.

Giant Swarm is a fast-growing open-source infrastructure management platform used by modern enterprises. Our vision is to empower developers around the world to ship great products.

Your Job

• The team is responsible for cluster management on AWS and Azure, using Cluster API and our own open source operators to build certain features. We develop and maintain features for those operators, including feature work on the upstream projects. We also develop solutions for long-term projects and goals of customers (for example: cost-effective cluster scaling with Karpenter).

• To keep up our high code quality, you ensure writing unit tests and end-to-end tests along with feature code.

• You help create and test releases for each cloud platform. Releases bundle upgrades of Kubernetes and other software, and ensure a smooth rollout of major platform feature additions or changes to customers.

• You take part in our on-call rotation for alerts and customer incidents. We keep our shifts quiet by fixing repeating problems long-term or communicating with customers to address specific issues such as misconfigurations.

• You help with customer support requests and incidents, for instance by finding and solving problems on production clusters.

• Onboarding of new customers, for example by preparing infrastructure like management clusters.

• You work independently on assigned tasks, asking questions and communicating actively with team members and other teams in case of questions and decision points.

Requirements

• You have experience with Go and at least one other programming language, and a strong software engineering background.

• You have worked extensively and gained operational experience with Kubernetes and at least one of the cloud platforms AWS and Azure.

• You are an experienced Linux user.

• You are used to deploying to production multiple times a day, and love to automate all the things.

• We – and our customers – are currently distributed (mostly) around Europe. Your main time zone should be UTC +/- 2.

• We are very active in the Cloud Native / Kubernetes space. If you are as well – or just love giving talks – that will be a perfect addition.
  

About us

Every new team member changes the team. We love to learn from each other and we are looking for people who know things we don’t. 

• Becoming part of Giant Swarm means that, by extension, you also become part of the Cloud Native community. We actively contribute to upstream projects and our quarterly hackathons will give you space to work on out-of-the-box projects. Occasionally, when we, as a team, want to fully focus on one project, we scratch all meetings and routines for a certain time to better focus during our hive-sprints.

• Continuous learning is important to us - we foster this through bi-yearly personal development talks, a budget for training/certifications/coaching as well as regular feedback talks and workshops. Our teams are cross- functional and collaboration is key. 

• Nothing crazy, but useful Basics: We currently operate on a 32 hour workweek (or 4 day workweek, you decide!). We don't count holidays but set a minimum number; You choose your own hard- and software; As a company that has almost, if not more, kids than employees, family-friendliness is crucial to us and paid parental leave is a no-brainer; We pay monthly perks that cover your costs for working remotely; We meet twice a year as an entire company and (if possible) see conferences as an important place to catch up with team members; We aim to be fully transparent (finance, salaries) unless it hurts people and trust you, based on this to make the best decisions

We failed in exactly describing our way to approach important company elements that can be described with ‘buzzwords’ such as agile mindset, cross-functional teams, self-organization, value of the individual or trust & teamwork. However, we truly care about them, we live them and we constantly iterate on them. Some snippets about how we do this are posted in our blog but by far not all of them. 

Important note: We are not hiring job descriptions. We hire humans. :) We welcome applications from everybody, regardless ethnic or national origin, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or age. When you apply for a role at Giant Swarm, we will also consider you for other relevant roles, or ones that may come up in future if this one isn't a good fit at this time.