writer - Infrastructure engineer (UK)
Requirements
• Track record. 5+ years of experience in infrastructure engineering, DevOps, or a similar role focused on building and operating large-scale, high-availability production systems at a high-growth product company. • Breadth. Experience running containerisation in production (a real cluster, not a lab), with experience in Helm and Terraform or Pulumi on at least one major cloud (AWS preferred), plus good proficiency in Python or Go for automation and tooling. • AI in workflow. AI is part of how you ship, not a thing you've read about — agentic tooling (Claude Code, Droid, Codex, internal skills) is in your daily loop, you've built or adopted AI-assisted workflows others now use, and you have strong opinions on where it's unreliable. This is a hard requirement, not a bonus. Candidates whose actual daily workflow does not already include AI tooling will not be advanced. • First-principles + decision-making. Demonstrated ability to Challenge the status quo, proactively identify systemic weaknesses, and propose innovative solutions to complex reliability problems — reason from constraints and failure modes (not analogy or vendor defaults), name the tradeoff in business terms (reliability vs. velocity, cost vs. blast radius, standardisation vs. one-off), and reject the "best practices" answer when it doesn't fit the problem. • Reversibility & blast-radius. Make reversible calls by default — write the rollback before you touch production, work fluently with monitoring and logging stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK or equivalent), and stress the system in safe places so it comes back stronger. • Cross-functional collaboration. Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills, with a talent for building strong relationships and Connecting with cross-functional teams — surface non-goals before anyone asks, and partner with product, security, and platform peers as one delivery surface. • Autonomy & end-to-end ownership. A strong sense of ownership and accountability, eager to Own mission-critical systems and drive them toward peak performance and unparalleled reliability. At least one 0-to-1 infrastructure build you owned end-to-end, with the outcome metric attached. • Software-engineering depth. A software-engineering background, not only config and scripting — you've designed, built, and shipped non-trivial production code (services, libraries, internal frameworks) in Python, Go, or a comparable language, you can read and modify the codebases your infrastructure runs, and you move between infra automation and feature engineering without changing brains.
Responsibilities
• Breadth across disciplines. Bring deep focus to one problem at a time, with the breadth to move between SRE, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Platform work over a quarter or two as the leverage shifts. This is not a thrash-every-week role — most of the time you're heads-down on one substantial initiative (the on-call posture, the release pipeline, the multi-region Terraform layout, the internal platform surface). Cross-layer fluency is what lets you pick the right next initiative; it isn't a weekly context-switch. • Simplicity / via negativa. Challenge the status quo and remove toil before adding features — automate operational tasks and infrastructure management with Python or Go, reject tools that don't fit the problem, and treat manual on-call work as a defect to be designed out, not a status quo to be staffed up. • Breadth across the stack. Design scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure across AWS (preferred), GCP, and Azure, working fluently across Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and the supporting cloud and AI tooling that backs WRITER's high-traffic platform. • AI in workflow. Run agents in your daily loop — Claude Code, Droid, Codex, internal skills — to investigate incidents, draft Terraform / Helm changes, write runbooks, scaffold tooling, and review PRs. Build the agentic setup as a collective surface: humans and digital teammates working as one team, with shared skills, shared context, and shared on-call workflows. Encode recurring infra tasks as internal skills any teammate (human or agent) can pick up and run, so the team's throughput compounds — not just your own. • Debugging fluency. Lead incident response, post-mortems, and root-cause analyses — trace failures to the underlying problem (never the symptom), apply the learning back into the architecture, and prevent the same incident from happening twice. • End-to-end ownership. Own the reliability, performance, and efficiency of WRITER's core services end-to-end — define and uphold the SLOs and error budgets, carry the on-call pager, and stand behind the outcome metric, not just the system you shipped. • Strategic vs. tactical balance. Balance this week's critical work with the 6–12-month platform direction — ship the on-call-driving fix today while shaping the multi-year observability, cost, and reliability investments that move WRITER's enterprise customers. • Cross-functional collaboration. Operate at the seams with product, security, and engineering peers — provide expert guidance on system design for reliability, performance, and scalability from conception through launch, Connect the infra agenda to product and revenue context, and disagree with evidence, not volume.
Benefits
• Generous PTO, plus company holidays • Comprehensive medical and dental insurance • Paid parental leave for all parents (16 weeks) • Fertility and family planning support • Early-detection cancer testing through Galleri https://www.galleri.com/partner/writer • Competitive pension scheme and company contribution • Annual work-life stipends for: • Wellness stipend for gym, massage/chiropractor, personal training, etc. • Learning and development stipend • Company-wide off-sites and team off-sites • Competitive compensation and company stock options
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