Lead DevOps Engineer

ActionKit; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Remote work (flexible hours)

Four weeks paid time off

Health insurance & 401(k)

Job summary

We Also Walk Dogs is seeking a DevOps engineer to move our stack to AWS and keep production systems highly available for millions of end-users. You will work at the intersection of cloud tech and mission-driven work, supporting ActionKit users who fight for progressive causes.

As part of a small, remote team, you will help lead us toward more automated, reliable, and scalable deployments while staying aligned with client needs and product goals.

Qualifications

• Ability to maintain and improve deployment quality with strong automation and monitoring.
• Vision to lead cloud adoption and compute efficiency.
• Empathy with clients and end-users in a small, remote team.

Responsibilities

• Keep production systems running with high uptime and reliability.
• Lead and implement AWS capabilities and modern tooling for efficiency and scalability.
• Collaborate across a small, remote team including developers and project management.

Skills

Cloud engineering

AWS

Automation

Monitoring

Tools

Django

MySQL

Ansible

Job description

Location: United States

We Also Walk Dogs needs you to help our clients win fights to make the world a better place.

Our product, ActionKit (actionk.it), is used by dozens of major progressive groups and not-for-profits to stay in touch with tens of millions of online supporters. Our clients use ActionKit to fight climate change, push back against corporate power and more.

We've already begun moving our stack from on-premises servers to AWS, and need a DevOps engineer to help us take that effort to the next level. If you'd like to work at the intersection of cool cloud tech and making a better world, this is the job for you.

ActionKit is built by We Also Walk Dogs. Named after a Robert Heinlein story about a company that specialized in solving impossible problems, We Also Walk Dogs has spent over a decade serving online progressive organizations and charities. We're a small, friendly, and clever company. And we all work remotely.

Is this the job for you?

• Do you keep production systems running? According to our external monitoring, we've kept 99.98% uptime this past year, and gone three months without downtime, while very actively working on the product. We need someone with the expertise and discipline to help us keep that going.
• Do you think in the cloud? After starting with a fully on-premises deployment, today we're serving millions of end-users from AWS. But we know that intelligently deploying new tools and cloud capabilities can help us do things we could never do with just a rack of servers, and we need a DevOps engineer who can take us there.
• Can you can wear a lot of hats? We're a small company and not much for bureaucratic divisions. The boss codes; the project manager gives sales demos; most everyone, including you, does a shift of at least a few hours each week answering our clients' support tickets.

Must haves:

• You need to care about maintaining a high-quality deployment. We've kept our uptime record with solid automation and monitoring, jumping on oddities before they become problems, and digging into root causes when things go wrong. We need you to be able to continue that tradition.
• You need vision as well as execution. We need you to not only keep things running smoothly, but also help lead us where we need to go next. You need expertise in modern tools and AWS capabilities, and a strategic sense of how we can use them for efficiency, manageability, performance, and reliability.
• You need to be in touch with others' needs. We're a small, tight-knit crew where everyone pitches in. Empathy with clients and end-users is also core to our business. Everyone on the team works directly with clients.

Nice to haves:

• Experience working with all-remote teams.
• Experience with Django, MySQL, and Ansible.
• Experience with AWS features and patterns like VPCs, ELBs, SQS, auto-scaling groups, multi-zone deployments, and so on.
• That said, experience with our stack is maybe the least important factor here; Even if you've used Rails instead of Django, Postgres instead of MySQL, or Azure instead of AWS, we want to hear from you.

Why work for us?

• Competitive salary. We are a self-funded, for-profit company.
• Remote work. Hours and location are flexible as long as you get the work done. In this day and age you shouldn't have to relocate to San Francisco for awesome work.
• Four weeks paid time off. We encourage you to take vacation; we are not the sort of workplace that pressures anyone into 60-hour weeks.
• A free, great health insurance policy and 401(k)
• Work with an awesome team for awesome causes.