Senior DevOps Engineer

DevOps is a culture not a team, but right now, we don’t have a better name for the group of people working to improve that culture other than… the DevOps Team. We’re looking to expand our team with two Senior level members - one focusing more on SRE, the other more on Platform engineering. 

You will be working on a mix of what might be referred to as Platform Engineering, SRE, and Developer Experience in other places. We’re a small team, we work across disciplines.

• Platform Engineering: Expanding and supporting our cross-product platform that Product Engineering teams build and run on top of. We aim to get close to “bring the application” with all the rest being batteries included.
• SRE: Pairing with and collaborating with Product Engineering teams to help them build, ship, and support services that operate brilliantly, from lightweight architectural conversations through to deep integrations with Datadog and other tooling.
• DX: Working with Engineering teams to help them work more efficiently, effectively, and with less frustration, including how they run locally and the path to Production.

Skills and experience we’re looking for…

Must

These are our “table stakes” today.

• Very practiced in remote and async work. We’re a distributed Product Engineering group.
• Stellar collaboration skills, both interpersonal and through git-based collaboration.
• Happy being on-call (1 in 5 rota, 1 week shift, with an escalation path and fallback always available).
• Have experience working through the “scale up” period of a SAAS company.
• Be a nice person to work with. We lead through consensus.
• Be very practiced in infrastructure as code (we use Terraform + Terragrunt currently).
• Be very practiced with AWS and happy working with AWS ECS, though we are looking to move in stages across to EKS.
• Be confident in leading projects which have significant impact cross multiple teams across the organisation.
• Finding pragmatic scaling solutions for a product that grows significantly every month which are not just “add more AWS”.

Should

These are specific skills or experiences which we’re looking for. You don’t need to tick every box, but should consider yourself very competent in several of them. Tell us which!

• Deep Datadog skills (including pairing with Engineering teams to help them get the most out of it)
• MongoDB knowledge (we run in Atlas, we make use of Search)
• NodeJS or Python code in collaboration with Engineering Teams
• Supporting, expanding, and optimizing Continuous Delivery tooling, specifically GitHub Actions
• Experience in moving to, and working with, Kubernetes (EKS in AWS specifically)

Could

These are areas we are very likely to expand into and see more of. If you’ve worked in these areas before, tell us about them.

• Mongo Vector Search
• Workflow Management tooling in a SAAS environment (Temporal, AirFlow, Argo Workflow)
• Supporting ML workloads at scale
• Video streaming and hosting
• Building relationships with vendors and their management.
• Coordinating and managing incidents across a business

About us

Synthesia is the world's first AI video generation platform. It's a video production studio in a browser; no cameras, no film crews. You simply choose an avatar, enter your script, and your video is ready in minutes. We believe the future of media is synthetic, and we are on a mission to turn cameras into code and make everyone a creator. Check out our brand video to get a deeper insight into what we're working on here at Synthesia.

In engineering, we are working on a variety of ambitious projects that are critical to our mission. These range from hyper-personalized onboarding, which aims to introduce new customers to Synthesia through a low-latency, highly personalised experience, to creating our own video delivery platform. This platform, in addition to addressing typical concerns such as video transcoding and tiered storage, will allow us to offer proprietary media formats to our customers, including nonlinear and translatable video.

This is a full-time, permanent role. You can work remotely in Europe or hybrid from one of our hubs in London, Copenhagen, Munich, or Amsterdam. 

At Synthesia, we expect everyone to…

• Be an owner.
• Focus on outcomes over inputs and plans.
• Make the journey fun.
• Default to simple.

You can read more about our values here.

You can expect in return...

• A competitive package. The salary range is in the region of £100,000 - £130,000 GBP base (or a local equivalent) + bonuses and stock options  in our fast growing Series C start-up.
• A remote-friendly environment.
• 25 days of annual leave + public holidays in the country where you are based. Regular socials and company retreats.
• A generous referral scheme.
• A huge opportunity for career growth as you’ll help shape a market-defining product.
• Other country-specific benefits based on the country you are hired in such as private healthcare in some countries.

Please note:

• We only hire full-time employees - no contractors or B2B possible
• You must be based in Europe or US Eastern timezone for this role
• We do not offer relocation support
• We can offer VISA sponsorship in the UK if you are in the UK already