Outcomes:

• Automate our infrastructure - you believe in Infrastructure As Code and detest manual tasks. Success is measured by your ability to spin up environments on demand.
• Build observability into our environment and applications that help us monitor and self-heal when problems come up. Make the right trade-off between reliability and product feature speed - come up with metrics that define the tradeoff, get buy-in from stakeholders and measure against those.
• Automate code deployments so that we can release daily and often multiple times a day.
• Active involvement and mentorship of junior engineers doing code reviews resulting in up leveling the skill set for the entire team.

How to achieve the Outcomes:

Functional Acumen Required:

• Strong exposure to AWS. Knowledge of other cloud providers is a plus
• Strong knowledge in at least one of the languages(Go, Python, Kotlin, Java)
• Master of at least one domain - Infrastructure As Code tools(Docker, Terraform, Puppet, Helm), Monitoring tools(Prometheus, Zabbix), Container Orchestration tools(Kubernetes, Docker), Database technologies(Cassandra, Postgres), CI/CD tools(Jenkins, Spinnaker)
• Able to understand and articulate the design and application of the architecture of the entire system
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, cloud native applications and system design (Answer - how to create scalable fault tolerant systems?)

Search for the truth:

• Focus on the “why”. Proactively asks questions to understand the problem we are trying to solve
• Understands the tradeoffs needed in creating good software in their area, which is often times an entire product or platform feature
• Proactively identifies problems with requirements (lack of clarity, inconsistencies, technical limitations) for their own work and adjacent work, and communicate these issues early to help course-correct.

Be An Owner:

• Strike the right balance between fixing the problem at hand and focusing on finding the root cause of the problem. For example, if it’s a production issue the priority is to fix the immediate problem and collect all the data necessary for root cause analysis. In a non-production environment, the focus should be on finding the root cause and fixing it the right way to make sure the problem doesn’t occur again.
• Shows initiative beyond merely knocking tasks off a list. Identifies and suggests areas of future work for themselves and their teams.
• Takes the initiative to identify and solve important problems even if they are not in their domain or work area because of the ability to spot problems downstream and work with others to fix them before they become fires.

Shared Commitment to Excellence:

• Identify and proactively tackle technical debt before it grows into something that requires significant up-front work to resolve. A rule of thumb is to start looking into root cause of issues whenever there is noise. There is no smoke without fire.
• Able to work independently with very little oversight beyond high-level direction
• Participates extensively in code reviews, mentors others via code reviews and pairing, document thoroughly as well as frequently presenting at team meetings

Realtime Candor:

• Communicates effectively, consistently and in a timely fashion, across functions and is able to work well with the Product Engineers, Product Managers and Business teams. The ability to get work done across teams goes beyond mere proactive status updates (although that is expected as well).
• Play a leadership role in making the right trade-offs with other teams even when doing so might mean more work for themselves, as long as that is the right thing to do.