Platform Engineer - Parse.ly

Parse.ly a part of WordPress VIP is the real-time content measurement layer for the entire web. Our analytics platform helps digital storytellers at some of the web’s best sites such as Arstechnica The New Yorker TechCrunch Wired The Intercept Slate and many more. In total our analytics system handles over 65 billion monthly events from over 1 billion monthly unique visitors. Parse.ly and WordPress VIP are part of Automattic the people behind WordPress.com WooCommerce Tumblr Simplenote Jetpack Longreads Day One PocketCasts and more with a mission to make the web a better place. Automattic is a distributed and global-first company with more than 1900 Automatticians in 96 countries speaking 120+ different languages.

About the Role

With 40% year-on-year growth we are expanding our team and looking for a platform engineer to join us. The platform team is responsible for designing implementing and maintaining the development solutions for the Parse.ly real-time analytics systems. The team applies DevOps and SRE practices such as Infrastructure-as-code automation pervasive monitoring/alerting and close collaboration with application engineers. The team works with the Parse.ly Backend Frontend and Machine Learning Engineers and owns Parse.ly’s distributed cloud environment. This environment involves 400+ servers running in 9 Availability Zones and 3 Regions in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It also includes AWS-managed services such as RDS EMR ElastiCache and Athena.

Parse.ly’s platform engineering team already makes use of technologies like CI/CD Ansible Terraform Nomad Docker and AWS services to maintain Parse.ly’s infrastructure and security. As a Platform Engineer at Parse.ly you will be expected to master these technologies.

As an experienced Platform Engineer you will help build the platform that hosts all of our applications and services — while ensuring consistent uptime provable reliability and top-rated performance of our streaming data systems.

What you’ll do

For this role you should already be a senior platform engineer who wants to work with data at scale. You will:

• Implement and manage infrastructure as code practices using Terraform and Ansible to automate the provisioning and configuration of resources. Ensure scalability and reliability of our cloud infrastructure platform AWS.​​

• Develop and maintain monitoring and observability solutions using tools like Datadog Grafana log management and traces to track platform performance and health and report on enhancements to key Service-Level Objectives (SLOs)

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate the build test and deployment processes with GitLab CI.

• Identify and eliminate manual repetitive tasks through automation. Develop scripts and tools to automate infrastructure management configuration and maintenance.

• Work with developers to establish practices for deploying and managing apps. Help them use containerization tech such as Docker and Nomad for reliable and scalable app deployment.

• Gain operational expertise for core data infrastructure technologies including Amazon S3 Kafka Zookeeper Storm Cassandra Elasticsearch Redis Postgres and Spark.

• Contribute to a Python software development project in a production environment.

• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation.

Parse.ly Technology Stack

We currently adopt the following technologies across the Parse.ly platform:

• Python & JavaScript

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Databases like Elasticsearch Redis Cassandra and Postgres

• Frameworks like Django FastAPI and the PyData stack (e.g. Pandas)

• Kafka Storm Spark in production atop large data sets (terabytes per day)

• System management with Ansible Terraform and Nomad

• Containerized workloads and services

Salary range: $70000-$170000 USD - Please note that salary ranges are global regardless of location and we pay in local currency.

Read more about our compensation philosophy and benefits .