AWS Engineer | UK / Europe Remote | £60-80K

About SearchPilot

SearchPilot built the first SEO A/B testing platform to come to market. We are on a mission to prove the value of SEO for the world’s biggest websites by empowering them to make agile changes and test their impact, and we are looking to expand our small engineering team.

SEO is Search Engine Optimisation - helping our customers grow their visibility in Google and other search engines. We are making the process of SEO more data-driven and scientific. We are proud to bring real value to the teams and companies using our technology.

SearchPilot was spun out of Distilled (now Brainlabs), a global digital marketing agency with offices in Seattle, New York and London.

About the Role

We are looking for an AWS Engineer who is based in the UK or Europe to help us as we take our infrastructure to the next level. As part of our service, we proxy traffic for many other websites, which requires a large, robust, and cutting-edge infrastructure.

You would be someone who understands AWS well and is prepared to think outside the box, to help us provide the absolute best possible performance for our customers. You will be prepared and capable of architecting solutions yourself from the ground up.

SearchPilot operates by sitting between a customer’s CDN and their origin server, which means that resiliency and performance are of utmost importance to us. We work closely with our customers’ own tech teams to ensure our integrations with their technology stacks are robust.

Our infrastructure is built inside AWS, and has steadily grown over time, but our engineering team is still relatively small at just nine of us.

We are looking for somebody who has strong AWS knowledge and can work alongside our existing SRE to help build the backend infrastructure needed for new product features, as well as help us squeeze the existing infrastructure to be as performant as possible.

This role would include some customer-facing time (1-2 calls a week discussing integration with customer teams, and responding to the odd ad-hoc query from customers). This means you need strong communication skills, and it is also helpful to have a broad knowledge of technologies beyond the ones we directly use, as we work with customers using a variety of solutions.

You will work alongside our existing SRE, and report directly to the CTO.

An overview of your responsibilities:

• Working with developers to spec out and build out solutions to cater to new features. A recent example was deploying Kinesis to gather streaming data from 7 AWS regions, which is then aggregated and stored centrally.
• Iterative improvements and refinements to what we have. For us, performance and resilience are absolutely critical, and there is still plenty of scope for further improvements here. We are looking for someone not just to make the improvements, but to ideate them and drive them forward.
• In the late stage of the sales cycle, we typically have a couple of rounds of integration calls with prospective customers to work out what challenges we might face and help them understand what deployment looks like.
• We have customers using Akamai, CloudFlare, Fastly, CloudFront, and more as CDNs, and with a wide variety of backend technologies.
• After you have bedded in you will join the on-call rota. In the last few months, we have seen maybe one call a month, and these are often during work hours.

Technologies we currently use:

• AWS: EC2, ECS, RDS, ELB, NAT Gateway, Route53, CloudFormation, Kinesis, S3, KMS, Fargate, Batch, CodePipeline & more.
• We use Python in places for controlling orchestration.
• Our proxy layer is homegrown and written in Golang
• The web app is Django + React

Location Flexibility

We are looking for applications from UK or European-based candidates who wish to work primarily remotely, with occasional travel to London (1-2 a year).

We believe in the benefits of working remotely, but also value a sense of shared mission and personal community, which benefits from sometimes getting together. If your circumstances don’t perfectly align with this, we are flexible to discussion.

Application Process

To apply for this role please complete the form below. We are more interested in your skills and potential than we are in where you went to school or whether you went to university, but SRE/DevOps experience and strong AWS knowledge are essential.

We anticipate the interview process will include a short qualification call followed by 2 remote video interviews with different members of the team. We may ask you to complete a short technical task between the interview rounds.

Preferred Experience / Skills

We’d love to meet anyone who ticks most of the following:

• Strong AWS experience and knowledge
• Experience with architecting cloud solutions
• In-depth understanding of HTTP & networking; for our proxy layer it is important to understand this well
• A strong communicator who can explain technical concepts clearly
• Enjoys getting things right whilst realising that done is better than perfect
• Enjoys learning new things
• Self-directed and self-motivated
• Exposure to various CDNs is useful, but not essential.
• Prometheus experience is helpful.

Benefits

• Expected salary range £60-80k depending on experience
• 25 days annual leave plus 8 bank holidays
• Subsidised private healthcare and life insurance
• 5% pension matching
• Subsidised gym membership
• A laptop and second monitor
• A Kindle with some books preloaded
• A £600 personal budget each year you can use to make you happier or more productive at work such as a new flashy monitor, a new office chair, or training
• Company-funded drinks and snacks on Friday afternoons (when we’re in the office!)

About SearchPilot

SearchPilot spun out of Distilled in early 2020, with the whole software team of 14 becoming part of the new company. At Distilled, the product was called DistilledODN.

At SearchPilot we are passionate about our team, and we want that to be more than just words. We want to continue to build a team of people who can thrive and succeed, as well as feel valued and welcomed, at all levels.

As part of that goal, we are trying hard to actively build a diverse team, as we believe diversity is a necessary component to building the strongest company possible. To this end, one of the steps we have taken is committing to an annual report assessing how we are doing on this front: 2020 report / 2021 report.

SearchPilot does not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, marital status, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion, or any other characteristic irrelevant to an individual’s ability to fulfill the relevant role. We are committed not only to meeting our legal obligations in this area but also to the positive promotion of diversity in our teams.