Platform Engineer (Europe/Remote)

AT CASTOR, WE DRIVE FASTER, SMARTER MEDICAL RESEARCH

We believe that faster, more diverse clinical trials help extend the human health span and provide a greater return on investment.

We strive to improve the clinical trial experience for patients, sites and sponsors, using technology to accelerate every step of the clinical trial journey.

Our modular clinical trial platform enables the capture and re-use of research data from anywhere, anytime and helps optimize each activity in the clinical trial journey by reducing human effort with technology. From recruitment to monitoring, we help make it easier to design and deploy trials, enroll and engage patients, collect data and analyze results.

Next to being very purpose-driven, we are proud of our caring company culture. We follow our values diligently and take the well-being of each Castorian seriously. Sounds like something for you? Read on!

The Role

Castor’s products have supported over 100.000 medical researchers to capture almost 250 million data points in over 8.000 research projects across the globe - and as we scale, these numbers are rapidly increasing. This continuous growth requires a sustainable yet flexible infrastructure that supports the global roll-out of our platform while meeting the needs of our customers with respect to reliability and security. We are now looking to expand our team with additional infrastructure specialists and DevOps enthusiasts to make sure we can continue to meet these requirements over the coming years. 

As a Platform Engineer, you will be joining the team which supports Castor’s developers in getting their services running in production in a secure and reliable manner. After successfully completing a journey into public cloud throughout 2021-2022, our team is now helping development teams leverage cloud technologies and SaaS options in their products. As such, the main focus of this role is to build out a platform and fundamental infrastructure necessary for product development teams to operate their services on top of Azure cloud solutions.

Typical day to day work will also include maintenance work necessary to “keep the lights on”. We strive to find a balance between minimizing toil and being pragmatic, which means not everything is perfectly automated, but we’re certainly biased towards avoiding manual and repetitive work.

You will be responsible for: 

• Assisting in the design and implementation of solutions for Castor’s product development teams to run their services on Azure cloud.
• Following established best practices at Castor for utilizing cloud solutions, and sharing this expertise with product development teams through the creation of guidelines, documentation, and active participation in training sessions.
• Improving the security and reliability of platform-owned services by following established internal and external requirements.
• Participating in 24x7 on-call rotations for core platform services.
• Contributing to technical documentation efforts and Architecture Decision Records to ensure clear understanding of architecture and services.
• Providing operational support for platform-owned services through the support rotation.

The Team

You can expect to join a team which follows a set of core values, guiding daily collaboration. These include a commitment to deliver high-quality work, good documentation and knowledge sharing, and a strong focus on transparency and openness. While we don’t automate everything, we try to minimize toil in the day-to-day and ensure a good work-life balance by being flexible around working hours.

The Platform team is, just like the rest of Castor, working remote-first. This means we strive to enable asynchronous work as much as possible. Current members are based in the Netherlands and Sweden, but we also welcome applications from further afield.

About You 

We are looking to hire a platform engineer into our team. Ideally, you will have at least 3 years of experience with DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering, but we’re open to a broad range of skills and expertise. We’ll definitely consider people who’ve been in application development roles as well, especially when you’ve touched a lot of deployment pipelines or monitoring/observability problems.

To give you an idea of skills we’re looking for, consider the following as guidelines:

• An understanding of the basics of various system/cloud architectures and their pros and cons.
• Foundational skills in deploying and optimizing cloud-based solutions on a major cloud provider, such as Azure or AWS.
• General knowledge of Linux, web applications, networking, and databases.
• Exposure to containerization and surrounding tooling, such as Docker.
• Understanding what Infrastructure as Code entails, including tools like Terraform, and recognizing its advantages.
• Familiarity with monitoring server and application performance, coupled with the ability to troubleshoot issues.
• Openness to mentoring and support for personal development.

Please note that we are open to hire from different European countries and also authorized to provide visa sponsorship for the Netherlands. However, we are unable to accept applications from France, Spain, Bulgaria, Sweden, and Switzerland.

 How Castor takes care of you

At Castor we truly live and breathe one of our core values, believing we can achieve anything with a healthy and happy team. Our benefits reflect this:

• Guaranteed ‘happy holidays’ bonus  
• Employee Stock Option Plan 
• Learning & Development Budget to support your growth
• Unlimited annual leave 
• A fully remote role, with support for your home office set-up
• A flexible working schedule: nobody is tracking your time except you, we focus on output and delivery
• A great work-life balance
• Quarterly downtime weeks, well-being workshops, sleeping courses, virtual company events and celebrations
• Annual company retreats in person 🌴

We are a remote-first company. At Castor,  we value flexibility and believe that the best talents can work anywhere in the world. From flexibility improvements to productivity growth, we want to make sure you are happy, healthy, and productive while working from home.

Don’t have an updated CV just yet? Feel free to apply with your LinkedIn profile.