Introducing the Ubie Platform/SRE Team

3 min readNov 2, 2023

Hello, I’m Teruya Ono, responsible for infrastructure engineering and SRE at Ubie. I joined Ubie this June and have been experiencing exciting days ever since. In this article, I’ll introduce the areas and regular tasks handled by the SRE and infrastructure development teams at Ubie.

About Ubie

Ubie is a health-tech startup based in Japan, India, Singapore, and the United States, with the mission of “Guiding people to appropriate medical care through technology.” Using our symptom search engine “Ubie” users can easily inquire about their symptoms and get free information on related illnesses and remedies by simply answering several questions. This service is offered not only in Japan but also in the US, serving over 7 million users monthly. Apart from the symptom search engine “Ubie” we also have businesses catering to healthcare institutions and pharmaceutical companies.

Ubie: https://ubiehealth.com/

corporate website: https://ubiehealth.com/company

About the Ubie Platform/SRE Team

Our team consists of 8 members now(2023/10/27), including SREs, platform development engineers, infrastructure engineers, and security engineers. Many of our engineers, like myself, wear multiple hats due to the interconnected nature of our tasks. We also have engineers from our US division, so all our conversations on Slack and meetings are conducted in English.

Our team is stimulating and full of learning, with members actively involved in open-source software development and some recognized as Google Developer Experts.

What We Do

SRE & Infrastructure Engineers

At Ubie, all our infrastructure is managed on GCP, with most of our computing resources running on GKE. Our primary tasks involve the development and operation of these platform.

While our GKE clusters are segmented based on product domains, they aren’t entirely isolated yet. A major ongoing project involves dividing these clusters appropriately and transitioning existing services. Additionally, we work on monitoring, incident response, and enabling product development engineers, all aimed at enhancing product reliability.

To improve the productivity of product development engineers, we adopt a platform engineering approach and provide service templating tools. Using these tools, writing a short configuration file generates numerous k8s manifests and other configurations, reducing the time to launch services.

As a startup, Ubie is ever-evolving, making it both challenging and exciting to design the most suitable platform for our current needs.

Platform Development Engineers

These engineers handle the development and operation of products commonly used across the company:

Identity Platform: Responsible for authentication and authorization of our customers and partners. Since our company adopts microservice architecture, this platform is also responsible for service to service authentication and authorization, and provides good developer experience to build their microservice securely and easily with context aware access control.

Consent Platform: Manages consent regarding privacy policies and third-party data sharing.

Deletion Platform: Ensures safe and definitive data removal from various microservices, especially for users who opt out.

Security Engineers

Given that our product deals with sensitive health information, ensuring its secure and compliant operation is crucial. Recent activities include setting up vulnerability scanning workflows using OSS developed in-house and establishing secure DB access methods using GCP’s Cloud Workstation.

Team Activities

We have daily meetings and bi-weekly retrospectives & planning sessions. We also regularly host events like “lean coffee,” where team members bring up topics they’re curious about. Topics chosen by voting are then discussed for about 10 minutes. It’s a great way to understand each other’s interests and gain insights into tasks we might not usually discuss.

In the lean coffee session, we use miro board to list up topics

At Ubie, there’s a culture of “Ask when in doubt and achieve results as a team.” Outside of these meetings, team members frequently engage in discussions and consultations on platforms like Slack and Google meet.