Principal/Lead Dev-Ops Engineer

The Role

Cascade is looking for an experienced dev-ops practitioner to join a cross-functional engineering team building a pioneering SaaS product, in Sydney (preferred) or the AEST timezone. You'll be collaborating with an existing dev-ops engineer based in Berlin, principal application engineers, as well as a broader team of product and platform focussed engineers based mainly in ANZ and product experts building a class leading business strategy product for enterprise customers.

At Cascade we highly value diversity and inclusion, and the wide range of experiences and skills that come with a diverse workforce. Therefore we strongly encourage candidates from under-represented groups to apply. Even if you don't think you quite meet all of the skills listed or tick all the boxes, we'd still love to hear from you.

A day in the life

• You'll look after a multi-region mixed-paradigm (serverless/container) application written primarily in TypeScript and hosted on AWS and GCP.
• This technical and team leadership role will require you to thoughtfully examine problems, opportunities, constraints, and the tools at our disposal, to recommend, lead and influence our team towards new technical approaches and ways of working.
• You'll have significant input into the technical roadmap, driving change and improvements within our dev-ops culture and tooling.
• You'll collaborate with our other dev-ops engineer based in Berlin and the rest of our engineering team to ensure the continuity of work in flight and to establish and execute on a technical strategy for deployment, security, observability, monitoring and tracing, operations, and more.
• You'll help us spread dev-ops knowledge across the whole team and build systems that empower our engineers to write and architect operable software — and run it. You see your mission as raising the knowledge and standards of our whole team.
• As with all roles that have an operations overlap, there might be some infrequent late nights or early mornings responding to emergencies or performing maintenance work at less busy hours — but part of our goal, and your job — is to help to reduce these incidences and make sure we can all get a good nights' sleep.
• You'll participate in and lead blameless post-mortems, drills, and other learning activities with your team.

About you

• Deep experience with AWS or an equivalent cloud provider — with compute workloads as well as other managed services such as queues, storage, access control and security, cost optimisation and operational monitoring
• Skill managing complex orchestrated systems with infrastructure-as-code; Terraform experience desirable
• A good understanding of performance and security fundamentals, both in terms of cloud best-practice and application architecture.
• Demonstrated experience with programming and building applications, especially using a modern web stack (TypeScript, Python, Go, etc.) — and willingness to pick up TypeScript if it's not already under your belt.
• A high level understanding of databases, key paradigms, and experience operating them in production environments.

Desirable/bonus:

• Experience with security compliance frameworks such as SOC-2, PCI, or ISO-27001
• Experience working with remote or distributed teams
• If you have experience as an SRE or can bring that mindset to the role — we'd love to pick your brain about monitoring, tracing and alerting, as well as establishing good cultures around these things.

A successful candidate in this role

• Enjoys being part of a team and sharing knowledge — they see success as team empowerment as much as their own productivity
• Deals effectively with ambiguity and can work strategically and collaboratively to develop a dev-ops roadmap
• Thinks deeply about the safety and operability of our product and invests time in proactive measures over firefighting
• Makes nuanced decisions about how when to double down on technology investments versus when to take on strategic debt
• Communicates effectively; sees a good dev-ops strategy as one that the whole team understands and supports
• Takes responsibility for the uptime, stability and availability of the product
• Independent and and self-motivated worker who sees documentation as an important productivity and collaboration tool

Salary and Benefits

• 180-200K AUD
• Competitive equity offer
• Be part of building something great