Job Application for Site Reliability Engineer at DFINITY

The SRE team at DFINITY is charged with creating tools, processes, and frameworks that ensure the stability of the Internet Computer, which is distributed and scalable. As a member of the team you will work with engineering, infrastructure, and security teams to bake reliability and operability into the product from the start, by participating in design and code reviews, identifying risks, problems, and mitigations. This is not a team that exists to be on-call; this is a team that elects to be on-call because it helps do the job better.

Responsibilities

Service Management: Design, build, deploy, and maintain services to ensure the high availability and reliability of DFINITY's products and the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP).
Automation: Identify and implement opportunities to automate processes through coding, enhancing efficiency and reducing manual intervention.
Reliability and Operability: Integrate reliability and operability into the product from the start by participating in design and code reviews, identifying risks, and proposing mitigations.
Collaboration: Work with engineering and security teams to establish processes that align with the goals of the Internet Computer while remaining operationally feasible and automatable.
Service Level Objectives (SLOs): Collaborate with product owners to define SLOs and implement them in code and observability infrastructure.
On-Call Duty: Participate in on-call duties for production services on a 12/7 schedule, split across two sites. On-call duty is approximately 1 week every 6 weeks. Coordinate incident response and ensure resolution, involving engineers from other teams as necessary. On-call work is compensated with a monetary and a time off compensation.

On-Call Philosophy: Our team chooses to be on-call because it enhances our ability to identify and address system alerts, ultimately improving performance.

Unix Systems: Operate, troubleshoot, and deploy software on Unix systems.

Requirements:

Observability: Proven experience in monitoring and maintaining large production systems using tools such as Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, Elastic Search, and Grafana.
Kubernetes: Proficiency in managing multiple observability stacks across various availability zones, leveraging Kubernetes for deployment orchestration.
Rust Coding: Extensive experience in designing and developing moderate-sized applications (up to ~10K lines of code) in Rust. Skilled in setting up automated testing and CI/CD environments. Ability to identify and implement opportunities for automation and process improvement. Experience in developing reliability engineering tools for large open-source projects is highly desirable.
Systemic Thinking: Capable of approaching problems methodically and systemically, especially during troubleshooting.
Pragmatism: Ability to balance immediate needs with long-term goals, understanding when a solution is "good enough for the next 12 months."
Incident Response: Expertise in coordinating incident response across multiple teams, with excellent communication skills to clearly understand the situation, next steps, and team responsibilities.
Reliability Engineering: Preferable experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) within a crypto environment where decisions are governed by DAOs.
Security Background: Experience in building security-sensitive tools and managing security risks in such environments. A background in DevSecOps is highly desirable.
Community interaction: Proven experience in engaging with community members of large open-source projects. Ideally, the candidate is already active within the ICP community.

Within 1 month, you will:

Gain a thorough understanding of DFINITY's infrastructure and production environment.
Start working on a suitable starter project.
Submit improvements to our documentation and processes based on your onboarding experience.

Within 3 months, you will:

Successfully deliver your starter project.
Shadow team members on-call, preparing to join the on-call rotation from month 4 onwards.
Proactively identify and propose improvements, initiating projects to implement them.

About DFINITY and the Internet Computer:

DFINITY is a leading contributor to the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), with a mission to bring the world's compute onto the secure ICP network. Built on its unique third-generation blockchain technology, ICP enables the development and operation of a new generation of unstoppable, tamper-proof, fully decentralized web applications. Its powerful technology can run entire AI models within smart contracts, representing a major advancement for secure AI. Through seamless integration with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other networks, ICP facilitates multi-chain operations for digital assets and web3.
Join our team of over 250 talented individuals, including world-renowned cryptographers, distributed systems engineers, programming language experts, and industry leaders, who are shaping the future of the internet and web3.

DFINITY was founded in 2016 by entrepreneur and crypto theoretician, Dominic Williams.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

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