Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Kraken is a technology company focused on creating a smart, sustainable energy system. As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you'll ensure the availability, performance, and scalability of products on the platform while leading a technical team to support millions of customers.

Responsibilities:

• Team leadership
• Have ownership of the Product Reliability team within Platform, working closely with the Director and Heads of Platform Engineering to define strategic objectives and team direction
• Manage team priorities and ensure initiatives are completed within deadlines
• Collaborate regularly and effectively with the Staff Platform Engineer in your functional team to deliver the technical implementation of the team’s strategic priorities
• Lead delivery of major initiatives on clear timelines
• Partner effectively in the wider Platform Engineering team to deliver outcomes
• Build a strong culture of open communication where teammates can ask questions without fear, promoting a positive and inclusive team environment
• People management
• Line-manage the engineers in the Product Reliability team
• Set clear performance expectations and goals for team members
• Regularly review individual and team performance, offering actionable insights and constructive feedback to support and grow team members
• Technical delivery
• Deliver technical improvements such as small features and bug fixes
• Support team delivery through code reviews, technology research and architectural guidance
• Provide support for service offerings owned by your team
• Help solve interesting and difficult problems. There’s a great opportunity for disruption in the global energy market

Requirements:

• Excellent communication skills, working effectively with developers, product managers and other business stakeholders to understand and deliver impactful projects and reliability improvements
• Record of successfully and consistently delivering critical path projects, on time and at scale
• Meticulous organisation and planning skills
• Experience of mentoring and coaching a team to perform at a high-level of quality
• Experience managing and supporting a large-scale internet-facing distributed systems, for millions of customers
• Good experience with AWS and a programming language. We use a lot of different AWS services and not just the standard few
• Knowledge of security best-practices, security and CI/CD tooling, and methodologies
• Previous experience in leading technical delivery for small, highly-autonomous teams
• Previous experience as a technical individual contributor, preferably as a Site Reliability Engineer
• Track-record of effective collaboration with other teams and departments to drive holistic outcomes
• A proactive, innovative mindset with the ability to drive continuous improvement
• Previous experience working in a remote-first asynchronous global team
• Familiarity with some of our tech stack: PostgreSQL, or a similar RDBMS, particularly in Amazon RDS at scale
• Docker and Kubernetes, we use Amazon EKS in production
• Python
• Datadog, or a similar logging/monitoring tool
• Messaging queues, event-driven async processing or similar technologies - we use RabbitMQ
• Terraform, or a similar infrastructure-as-code tool
• Experience with a Linux distribution