DevOps Engineer

Title: DevOps Engineer

Company: Samsung Research America (SRA)

Lab:  Bixby

Location: Mountain View, CA

How You’ll Contribute:

Bixby is a next-generation virtual personal assistant, brought to you by the team that created Siri. Bixby provides a truly open platform that lets any developer extend its knowledge and capabilities. It operates at a scale that few companies can match.

We seek high energy engineers with a tactical trifecta of skills who will enjoy the challenges and rewards of making Bixby a household name. That’s where you come in. You are someone who enjoys writing dev tools and infra as code, be it imperative or declarative. You love to build highly optimized ops systems that empower our product teams to operate at peak velocity. You take a defense-in-depth approach to your craft, think about different attack vectors throughout your process, and don’t just tack security on at the end. Finally, you’re great at grokking complex situations, explaining trade-offs, and communicating your ideas to a diverse global team.

Responsibilities:

We have a globally unique AI platform with a build and deployment process that goes way beyond what you’ll encounter at most organizations. You will help engineer a smart build system that shifts friction and complexity away from human stakeholders into software. The design goals exceed the capabilities of tools like CircleCI, Jenkins, and Argo. If you have that experience, we like that; this is more about Python, JavaScript, and custom tool building though.

Design, build, secure, and maintain clusters using EC2, ECS, Kubernetes, and others. To be effective at this, you need a strong working knowledge of Docker orchestration technology, and the kernel level constructs that make containers what they are, including union file systems. We’d like you to have opinions on single vs. multi-process containers, shared memory, and sidecars.

You will work with the product teams to continuously improve observability, monitoring, and incident response. We’re pretty great at avoiding alert fatigue, and we’d like you to help us keep it that way.

Join the fight to eliminate toil. This goes beyond automating all the things! Sure, if a machine could accomplish the task as well as an engineer, automate it. But occasionally you’ll find necessary tasks with no enduring value, and we want you to help us build high leverage systems that design that type of work away. In general, we believe that if a human operator has to touch our systems, we have a bug.

Actively integrate security into the stack at all levels. Work with our security researchers, product engineers, and other teams to build a hardened platform that resists attack from internal and external vectors.

Be an effective responder during production incidents. You must synthesize information gleaned from experience, logs, source code, and alerts to respond to production issues that may arise, and then help us engineer ways to avoid that problem in the future.

Requirements:

• Significant past experience in both software engineering and cloud-based ops, such as DevOps, SRE, or Operations Engineer roles.
• Experience using Python, JavaScript, or Golang in projects focused on developer tools, productivity, or operations/SRE.
• Experience with public cloud like AWS, Azure, GCP.
• Experience with container orchestration services including Docker or Kubernetes.
• You maintain a high bar for quality of code. You are disciplined about avoiding awkward workarounds (we know, this is ops, but still), and know the value of engineering discipline.
• We regularly interface with globally distributed teams, therefore excellent communication is a key skill for this role. You may be asked to show us you can write great docs.
• You know when to leverage off-the-shelf tools, and when we need something custom.
• You have design and implementation experience with several infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools. You can discuss at length tools like CloudFormation vs. Terraform vs. Pulumi. You should understand their tradeoffs, pitfalls, and ideally be able to talk about some battle scars from using them.
• You’ve used many of the DevOps staple technologies such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Datadog, Sumo Logic.
• You’ve used persistence layer tools like Postgres, MySQL, Elastic Search, Redis, Cassandra, etc.