Site Reliability Engineer (Senior)
The next generation of our digital products are delivering engaging, adaptive, and personalized learning experiences to optimally support every student. We are hiring a Senior Site Reliability Engineer who will work with system and software engineers to build reliable, high capacity and high-performance systems in support of our mission to reimagine learning for millions of students and learners worldwide. 
We aim to break down walls between development and operations; participate in finding and building solutions which enable teams to deliver software updates in a way that is highly stable and operationally sound. We are strongly invested in the AWS Cloud, infrastructure-as-code, and monitoring-as-code. We favor the practical and pragmatic over the ideal, including finding right-sized solutions. We are anticipatory and forward-looking, reliable, and have a bias toward taking action. We understand that without our customers our efforts are worthless, and that operational changes are likely to have a direct impact on user experience. We understand that up time is paramount, and we work backwards from there.
Essential Accountabilities:
Leadership:
● Listening to the needs of our teams, learning how they work best, and delivering solutions.
● The ability to collaborate with product teams and technical leads to prioritize our efforts.
● Stay current on industry trends; conceive and present to management ways to improve current practices, to improve our standing in the marketplace, and remain on the cutting edge of technology.
● Ability to take ownership over a project, drive it forward, “sell” it to other teams inside the company as a solution for a given problem, and work with teams to drive adoption.
● If you see an opportunity to solve a problem or otherwise make something better, take the initiative.
● Mentor team members; foster growth by setting high-reaching goals; providing support as needed to achieve them.
Technical:
● Hands-on design, understanding, and troubleshooting of highly-distributed, large-scale production systems — both modern and legacy, monolithic and micro.
● Co-ownership with the development teams over reliability, uptime, capacity, and performance.
● Ensuring the repeatability, traceability, and transparency of our infrastructure automation.
● Identifying highest-impact opportunities to optimize existing systems; ensuring “right-sized” and
cost-optimized solutions in consideration of technical and business constraints.
● System design consulting for teams seeking to leverage or improve their production infrastructure.
● Anticipate, build, and plan capacity for upcoming product/feature launches.
● Working with application teams and product principals to fully operationalize software/systems projects (including security requirements).
● Being part of an on-call rotation spread amongst the rest of the team. (The better we do at the things above, the quieter the rotation is!)
Required:
● MHE is a polyglot organization. Being “conversational” in JavaScript/TypeScript, Node, Python, PHP, Ruby, Golang, Java, Bash, Markdown, reStructuredText, HCL, JSON, YAML, and TOML would be valuable. Must be fluent in 2-3 of them.
● Must have the skills of a senior (or higher) level software application engineer.
● Must have the skills of a senior (or higher) level cloud operations engineer.
● Ability to translate knowledge and ideas into written-word as documentation/1-pagers.
● Excellent presentation and communication skills.
● Mastery of AWS services (IAM, EC2, S3, EBS/EFS, ELB/ALB, AutoScaling, RDS and replication techniques, VPC, Subnets, Elastic IP, Route53, CloudWatch, CloudFront, Lambda, CloudFormation, ECS, SNS, ElastiCache).
● Expertise in container/container-fleet-orchestration technologies (Kubernetes, ECS, Docker).
● Expertise integrating continuous-integration and continuous-delivery software development lifecycles (i.e., CI/CD) into one or more applications (using Jenkins, Circle CI, Travis CI, or other modern CI tools).
● Expertise in infrastructure automation technologies (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).
● Expertise with Lean/Agile deployment processes (e.g., blue/green, zero downtime, canary, and DNS strategies).
● Significant experience troubleshooting interactions among concurrent and distributed systems.
● Cloud database operations and deployment experience (e.g., RDS MySQL/Postgres/Aurora), caching operations & deployments (e.g., Memcache, Redis).
● Ability to design and manage escalation response plans — from monitoring, to
reaction/response/remediation, to retrospection/post-mortem in culturally-aligned (proactive, customer focused, collaborative, proven-with-data) ways.
● Familiarity with site and infrastructure monitoring systems (e.g., CloudWatch, Datadog, New Relic, Sumo Logic, Thousand Eyes).
● Cloud and container-native Linux administration/build/management skills (e.g., AMIs, Packer).
● Strong problem-solving, root cause understanding, and systems engineering skills.
● Expertise with software development lifecycle branching and distributed source code management systems (e.g., Git/Mercurial, Git-Flow, GitHub-Flow).
● B.S. Degree in Computer Science (or related technical field, or equivalent industry experience).
● A non-trivial background in open source is a HUGE plus.