We're looking for a
Head of Site Reliability Engineering to join our development team and grow the role of SRE in this early stage, rapidly scaling business. You know and value your craft and want to apply it to a mission that matters. You will have significant influence on the business as you build this critical function and instil a site reliability mindset across the whole team.You'll be as happy working with developers on architectural decisions to drive performance and reliability as you are working on infrastructure automation, monitoring and problem diagnosis. You will be an expert voice in technical discussions and a key stakeholder in operational and quality processes and tactics.As the Lead Site Reliability Engineer you will also champion the SRE way of thinking to drive quality across our stack from our client application users to the control of robots in the lab, and all services in between. You will help both our software and wetlab teams embed observability and reliability into everything we build.
The Company:Named by the World Economic Forum as one of the world's 30 Technology Pioneers 2016, and one of Gartner's 'Cool Vendors in Life Sciences' 2018, Synthace is revolutionising the way that biology is done!
Our revolutionary software platform - Antha - lowers the level of entry for scientists to introduce automation to their work, while allowing specialist technicians to get even more out of the existing equipment in the labs.
It is directly contributing to faster, more efficient research into hard to cure diseases such as Cancer. If social impact and knowing your work is having a positive impact on the world is important to you, it doesn't get much better than this.
Antha allows scientists to design biological experiments, simulate them, translate instructions for robotic lab equipment, and visualise complex data sets from the results. As you can imagine, there are a wide range of technical challenges that we are addressing, and the work is rewarding.
Our clients already include the likes of Microsoft, Oxford Biomedica, Ipsen, Merck and GSK, and we have ambitious plans to grow our customer base this year.
Read more about us on our 'Engineering at Synthace' and 'Careers at Synthace' pages.
The Role:Reporting to the VP Engineering, you'll be working within a tight-knit development team on exciting projects with plenty of technical challenge to get your teeth into.
Our current stack includes Kubernetes, Go, Google Cloud Platform, Postgres, Spinnaker and Kapitan, and you will have scope to influence technical decisions going forward.
While the team is small, this will be very much a hands-on role. Your direct reports would include one Site Reliability Engineer initially, but we see SRE as a vital function as we grow the business, and you will be play a major part in building, coaching and leading the team.What you'll be doing:
- Develop and execute plans for building an SRE function that is right for Synthace
- Ensure systems scale effectively through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity
- Harden our existing production environments and introduce good practice and processes for continuous improvement
- Troubleshoot, test, and maintain high-performance and scalable microservices in a global, federated container cluster
- Master our current technology stack which includes: Kubernetes, Go, GCP, Postgres, Spinnaker and Kapitan
- Be an advocate for SRE practices across the development team and provide practical guidance
- Monitor and maintain our production system
- Help own (with the development team) the processes and automation infrastructure which ensures high quality continuous releases of reliable infrastructure for our customers
About you:
- Prior experience in a similar SRE/DevOps leadership role is a must
- You are well versed in any of the following programming languages: C, C++, Java, Python, or Go (a background in software development before moving into DevOps is desirable but not strictly necessary)
- You have an understanding of declarative configuration, infrastructure as code and GitOps
- You're experienced with Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform, backup systems, and monitoring
- You are committed to delivering high quality software to a tight schedule
- You have excellent communication skills and thrive in fast-paced, multidisciplinary environments
- Bonus points for some background and/or interest in biology, but this definitely isn't required to be successful
Why work at Synthace:
- Work with genuinely extraordinary people
- Open, collaborative, and friendly culture
- Challenging, groundbreaking and exciting work
- Chance to be a part of the 'fourth industrial revolution', helping us to create tools and systems that allow