Senior Software Engineer - Backend, Cloud

Nextdoor (NYSE: NXDR) is the essential neighborhood network. Neighbors, public agencies, and businesses use Nextdoor to connect around local information that matters in more than 340,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries. Nextdoor builds innovative technology to foster local community, share important news, and create neighborhood connections at scale. Download the app and join the neighborhood at nextdoor.com. 

At Nextdoor, Cloud Engineers are responsible for building, deploying, managing, and securing the underlying cloud-based architecture that powers communities on the Nextdoor platform worldwide. These engineers have designed, built and implemented a globally scalable container and “serverless” based infrastructure that serves billions of requests a day, millions of active users, and hundreds of developers.

We build infrastructure and tooling that is iterable, scalable, and secure. We write everything in code from network infrastructure to server management, database provisioning, and data pipelines. Recently we have focused on scaling up our Kubernetes infrastructure. We created a dedicated management cluster to run ArgoCD, Loki, Prometheus, and Grafana. Additionally, we have created a second Kubernetes cluster for Nextdoor applications to ensure we can scale beyond the limitations of a single cluster. This will ensure Nextdoor’s infrastructure is able to scale for many years to come.

Additionally our team has focused efforts to modernize our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) by leveraging CDK to manage our AWS resources and Pulumi to manage our other core infrastructure systems such as PagerDuty, Datadog, and Sentry.

At Nextdoor, we offer a warm and inclusive work environment that embraces a hybrid employment experience, providing a flexible experience for our valued employees.

You will be responsible for building an efficient and scalable container and serverless computing environment for our product developers. In this team you will work in the ways of reliability engineering, design scalable systems from the ground up, and generally build systems that never page you. You serve all of our engineering teams by providing them with reliable and scalable infrastructure.

Here are just some of our team’s most recent deliverables:

• Operationalizing a second Kubernetes cluster to ensure Nextdoor can continue to scale beyond the limits of a single Kubernetes cluster
• Building automation for our developer’s workflows including applying 3rd party dependency updates automatically as well as distributing Helm chart updates
• Modernizing our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) by leveraging CDK and Pulumi
• Optimizing our Kubernetes resource management by leveraging Spot Ocean and Karpenter
• Providing self-service infrastructure-as-code systems to developers that automate the full lifecycle of managing, deploying and operating cloud services including blob/block storage, relational databases, key-value databases, caches and document search services
• Developing tooling for horizontally and vertically autoscaling our developers compute workloads
• Providing upstream open source patches to well known community projects like AWS Bottlerocket, the Istio Service Mesh, Keiko IAM Manager, Kyverno, Strimzi.io’s Kafka Operator and more!

• 7+ years experience in a DevOps or Cloud role
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes (k8s)
• Experience using TypeScript
• Experience with infrastructure as code (CDK, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Puppet, Salt, Ansible, Terraform, Packer)
• Thorough understanding of Linux and networking protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, HTTP/S, eBPF)
• Strong debugging and performance tuning skills using software like gdb, perf, strace, ltrace, tcpdump, Wireshark, etc.
• Experience with performance, automation, monitoring, and capacity planning
• Experience automating configuration and bootstrapping of Linux systems
• Eagerness to explore and apply AI and emerging technologies to reimagine how work gets done

• Experience using Docker or other containerization software
• Linux certifications such as Linux+, Network+, RHCSA/RHCE/RHCA or similar
• Experience in a large scale compute environment with hundreds or thousands of servers

Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs at Nextdoor come together to create our total rewards package. Compensation will vary depending on your relevant skills, experience, and qualifications. Compensation may also vary by geography.

The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $187,000 to $238,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater in the event that your 'level' of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role.

We expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role. With quarterly vesting, your first vest date will take place within 3 months of your start date.

When it comes to benefits, we have you covered! Nextdoor employees can choose between a variety of health plans, including a 100% covered employee only plan option, and we also provide a OneMedical membership for concierge care.

At Nextdoor, we empower our employees to build stronger local communities. To create a platform where all feel welcome, we want our workforce to reflect the diversity of the neighbors we serve. We encourage everyone interested in our mission to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or any other trait that unfairly targets a group of people. In accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we always consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

For information about our collection and use of applicants’ personal information, please see Nextdoor's Personnel Privacy Notice, found here.