BuzzFeed’s Core Infrastructure Group is looking for a highly experienced engineer to help take the infrastructure that powers our sites and products to the next level. You will be reporting to the Director of Engineering, Core Infrastructure. Our group’s mission is to make it painless, safe, and enjoyable for developers to build and manage their applications at BuzzFeed. We do this through building tools informed by best practices, which combine to create an observable, secure, and resilient platform.

We built rig — a PaaS on top of AWS ECS — in 2016. Since then we have continuously evolved and expanded the platform. Rig now hosts hundreds of microservices, which power and underpin all of BuzzFeed’s sites and products. Across the platform we’ve had around 150,000 deploys in the 3 years since launch.

In 2017 we created a single sign on identity aware proxy, SSO, which we open-sourced in 2018. This has seen wide adoption by the community, in terms of contributions to our GitHub repo and feedback we’ve received from others who rely on it.

Among our more recent initiatives are a unified storage library, which has added zero-config provisioning of datastores for developers, and the fully automated, continuous deployment to production, both of which are further eliminating friction from the development process.

We’re looking for an engineer who is passionate about and has a track record of building great developer-centric tools that have enabled their organizations to scale, while reducing friction. 

What you'll do:

• Influence the direction of the core infra group, ensuring we continue to solve the most important challenges to BuzzFeed’s infrastructure
• Be a mentor for the senior engineers across the organization
• Lead technical, organizational, and process improvements that will have an impact throughout engineering at BuzzFeed
• Build and maintain core infrastructure, including the platform that all other products and services depend on
• Participate in a support rotation to help keep the tech org running smoothly, while looking for ways to increase system resiliency and to automate away your own support tasks
• Collaborate with domain experts across the company, including engineers building user-facing products, data scientists training novel machine learning models, and investigative journalists publishing original reports.
• Work with a mix of proven and cutting edge technologies in a distributed ecosystem
• Participate in and lead collaborative code and architecture reviews
• Identify patterns where we can create standardized tooling to replace previous manual or adhoc solutions

Who you are:

• You enjoy building inclusive and creative engineering teams
• You take pride in discovering simple and elegant solutions to complex problems
• You have experience leading software engineering teams on large strategic projects and delivering them in a timely manner
• You are proficient at discovering and then translating business needs into straightforward technical requirements
• You value repeatability, resilience, observability, and operational simplicity
• You care about the developer experience
• You believe in minimizing the time that code spends between merge and deployment to production
• You always make the time to thoughtfully review others' designs and code
• You mentor and facilitate the growth of the people around you
• You carefully weigh the tradeoffs of any technology, knowing that they are simply tools that help you achieve your goals
• You think of systems as modular and composable services
• You are constantly learning and re-evaluating previous assumptions
• You are familiar with the foundational tools of modern development such as relational databases and REST.

Our Stack

Our production infrastructure runs on AWS. Rig, our containerized PaaS, is built on top of ECS, and follows the 12 factor app pattern. Our standard languages are Python and Golang. We don’t expect you to be expert in each of those, but would like you to have experience in comparable technologies.

Life at BuzzFeed

At BuzzFeed, we believe our work benefits from the diverse perspectives of our employees. As such, BuzzFeed celebrates inclusion and is committed to equal opportunity employment. As a BuzzFeed employee, you can expect:

• A supportive, inclusive atmosphere on a team that values your contributions
• Opportunities for personal and professional growth via work experience, offerings from our in-house Learning Team, engineering workshops, Employee Resource Groups, hack weeks, and more
• An attractive compensation package, including salary, equity and either pension contribution matching (UK) or 401K matching (US)
• An opportunity to assist journalists on stories through our Tech + News working group
• A generous and well-rounded benefits program featuring PTO and unlimited sick time, comprehensive medical benefits, a family leave policy, access to mental health platforms, retirement plans, gym and wellness discounts, team outings and much more
• No shortage of snacks, catered lunches, beverages, and birthday treats
• Additional PTO for participating in after hours support rotations