Want to be an SRE? Join Glasswall!

We’re hiring!

The SRE team at Glasswall is looking for a new Junior member to help make all our production systems scalable, reliable and thrive!

If you get a kick from engineering resilient solutions, automation and helping others build amazing services for our customers. We want to hear from you!

What is an SRE at Glasswall?

At Glasswall we follow the company that found SRE: Google and their implementation of SRE. Why? What’s the first website you check to see if your internet is up? Google.

Our main aim is to “Make our production services as reliable as possible while keeping the pace of innovation high”.

We do this by implementing SLOs and SLIs, defining best practices, automating all repetitive manual work, keeping changes to production frequent but in small manageable chunks, building disaster recovery tools and using industry-standard incident management.

An important part of being an SRE is being on call. At Glasswall you will be on call for one week and then off for the next 3 weeks. Being on call you are the interrupt person, you handle any incidents during and out of office hours for that week including weekends. This is the operations part of being an SRE and we make sure your workload is split 50/50 operations and software engineering. Being on call also means you will be doing the deployments to production and answering any external requests. We have this so the rest of the team can have a deep focus on other engineering work.

During the time you are not on call, you will be mainly focused on software engineering automation tools, providing support to other teams on resilience and scalability, building infrastructure using true IaC and building disaster recovery tools. We strongly believe this is the most important part of the role and will help us be successful in our goal of keeping our services as reliable as possible.

What are we looking for?

Not all of these skills are needed but should give you a good idea of the sort of person we are looking for. For us, the soft skills are more important, you can train technical, soft is more of who you are as a person.

Soft skills

• You are passionate about the world of cloud engineering and programming.
• You love learning new skills and are always pushing yourself to learn more.
• You can deal with high-pressure situations, step back and get the full picture before jumping in.
• Complex polymorphic problem solving is your bread and butter. You love the solution and want more!
• You grasp new concepts quickly and to a high standard.
• You thrive in a strong teamwork environment and put the team first in all of your actions.

Technical skills

• Strong software engineering practices that include clean architecture, clean code, high but quality test code coverage and creating documentation the whole team and community as a whole can use.
• Programming languages such as Python or Go.
• Key DevOps practices such as CI/CD and source control with Git.
• Experience with cloud technologies such as Kubernetes and Serverless.

What are we offering?

• High autonomy. You’re the engineer and craftsman we are here to enable you to make your masterpiece your way.
• Space to learn. 10% of your time is reserved training days. Access to online training tools including Linux Academy and Pluralsight.
• Career progression and mentorship. We want you to be the best version of yourself. Clear goals and development plan to get you where you want with space and tools to achieve those goals. You will be stretched daily which creates real rock star engineers.
• Bottom-up change. The team has strong control over its destiny with the decision on new technologies and project work is decided by the team as a whole, not management.
• Interesting work. We are open sourcing our tools, building chat ops bots, using true infrastructure as code and building beautiful monitoring platforms.
• Glasswall company benefits: Private health care and share options.
• Once passed probation can work from home up to 2 days a week.
• Total Package from £35,000 based on ability.

How to apply

This role does include shift on-call work. One week on 3 weeks off.

Must be able to commute to our offices in Chelmsford, Essex.

Email us at careers@glasswallsolutions.com with your CV and an answer to this question:

If you had a simple HTTP web server and you had an agreed SLA of 99.9% with all your users what tools, cloud infrastructure, and best practices would you use?

We don’t need an essay but feel free to express your ideas in a Word document, diagram, markdown file, PowerPoint or YouTube video. Use whatever tools work best for you!

This position is open until we find a suitable candidate.