SRE Engineer

About Howl

Howl is a new marketplace designed for creators and brands who crave transparent collaboration.

In the last 10 years, the $20bn influencer ecommerce market has become a critical part of the retail industry. It has evolved into social commerce, a new $1.2 trillion market opportunity requiring new tools, protocols, and technologies for the creator economy. Howl’s tools are designed for humans who know that scale and growth come from working together with consistency and transparency. Howl makes it easy, reliable and motivating to earn even more. That’s what makes Howl the home planet for creator-led growth.

Howl is a remote-first company with a diverse team that reflects our vision. Our private beta launched in mid-2022 and powers social commerce for creators and brands across beauty, gaming, home, fashion, and consumer electronics for both industry leaders like Best Buy, Samsung, Target and cult favorites like Cariuma, Kosas, and Youth to the People. We are a Series A company backed by investors including HighlandX and NEA.

For more information, visit www.planethowl.com.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join our Social Commerce Marketplace. As a Senior SRE, you will play a crucial role in ensuring our cloud infrastructure's reliability, scalability, and performance. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to implement best practices, automate processes, and enhance our systems' availability. The ideal candidate is an expert in Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, and possesses strong programming skills in languages such as Python or Golang.

Responsibilities:

• Design, deploy, and maintain scalable and resilient cloud infrastructure using Kubernetes, Docker, and ECS.
• Collaborate with software engineering teams to define infrastructure requirements and ensure smooth application deployments.
• Implement and improve monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes to ensure high system availability and reliability.
• Develop and maintain automation scripts and tools for provisioning, configuration management, and infrastructure as code.
• Perform capacity planning and optimization to ensure the efficient use of resources.
• Troubleshoot complex issues across the entire stack, from applications to infrastructure components.
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response efforts to minimize downtime and service disruptions.
• Mentor and provide technical guidance to junior members of the SRE team.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field (or equivalent work experience).
• Minimum of 5 years of hands-on experience in a Site Reliability Engineer or similar role.
• Strong expertise in containerization technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker.
• Proficiency in cloud services, specifically AWS, including experience with infrastructure provisioning and management.
• Solid programming skills in languages such as Python, Golang, or similar.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and configuration management tools (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, Ansible).
• Experience with message queueing systems like Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• In-depth understanding of networking, security, and monitoring best practices.
• Proven track record of automating manual processes and improving system reliability.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to analyze and resolve complex technical issues.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in cross-functional environments.
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotations and handle incident response.

Additional Preferred Qualifications:

• Relevant certifications in cloud platforms (e.g., AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator).
• Experience with infrastructure as code tools (e.g., Terraform).
• Familiarity with microservices architecture and container orchestration patterns.
• Previous experience in an agile development environment.

Howl Tech Stack

One of the most frequent questions asked by candidates of Howl engineers is, “What is your tech stack?” This is a brief overview of our tech stack.

• Howl's systems are implemented as a modern microservices architecture running on Linux servers hosted in AWS. We use Kubernetes to manage our containers, we use Flask to construct our Web interfaces. We build interactivity in our web interfaces using React. 
• Our favorite programming languages are Python 3, Go, Elixir, and, on the frontend, TypeScript and JavaScript. We stash our code in GitHub.
• We test each language with an appropriate unit testing tool - PyTest, Cypress, and Jasmine. We use Jenkins to run our builds and tests.
• Check-ins against the main branch require a code review by another SWE.
• We keep some data in Snowflake, some in Postgres and Elasticsearch and some, of course, in MySQL. We build our product graph using Neptune. We are working to reduce the number of databases we rely on.
• We stream data around using Kafka, and Storm. Maybe we will prune/update this list sometime.
• We are not hostile to commercial software - we use DBT, DataDog, Fivetran, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Looker, Notion.

The base salary range for this role is $1700,000/yr - $210,000/yr USD.

At Howl, we offer a competitive compensation package inclusive of base salary, incentive pay and stock options. Incentive awards are allocated based on individual performance. Certain roles also have the opportunity to earn sales incentives based on revenue, depending on the terms of the plan and the employee’s role. 

Howl is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, or veteran status.