About the job
This role has a time zone requirement due to the way the team works. We're only able to accept applications from candidates in UTC +0 to UTC +12 timezones.
Since launching membership features in Ghost v3, we've seen more and more creators using Ghost as a platform not just for publishing - but as a foundation for funding independent journalism. As a result, our customer-base has become less technical, and we now have customers staking their businesses - and by extension their reputations - on the product and platform we offer.
This is a new role that represents a shift in the way we see delivering Ghost as a product. You'll be focussed on delivering stability and scalability within the Ghost(Pro) team, and helping to ensure that they're considered as first-class citizens in our processes and infrastructure.
You'll evangelise pragmatism over perfection, leveraging engineering as a tool to deliver value to customers and encouraging value-based discussions over technology-led decision making. You'll help balance our culture of "move fast and break things" with an eye on how risk-averse we need to be and what we're willing to break.
This is a key role in a small team with plenty of freedom to help architect the platform behind Ghost(Pro) - which is already serving close to a billion requests each month. You'll be responsible for designing, deploying, and maintaining tools and services to support robust infrastructure across all levels in our stack: storage, databases and containerised applications all the way through to request routing, CDN integration and email deliverability. You'll also be involved in collaborations with other areas of the business - for example integrating Ghost(Pro) with billing and support systems, and managing email deliverability.
All our infrastructure is managed and deployed through config management and supported by a lot of custom code - so being comfortable with git and software development (preferably Node/Python) is a must. Our infrastructure comprises about 100 servers across two datacenters, running Ubuntu and managed with Saltstack, sitting behind a fairly deep CDN integration. Most common tech across our instances includes MySQL, Varnish, OpenResty/Nginx, LXC, Gluster, and a whole lot of Node.js.
The team behind Ghost(Pro)'s infrastructure spans multiple timezones so incident management responsibilities typically follow the sun. However - this role does include an on-call requirement for weekends and holiday cover. On-call is a shared team responsibility, and our pay ranges and offers are inclusive of compensation for on-call responsibilities.
Skills and experience
- 5+ years experience in an operational infrastructure/SRE role
- The ability to automate, automate & automate more
- Skilled in communicating context and visibility into technical changes to both technical and non-technical peers
- Experience and confidence in managing, deploying and maintaining complex projects across several different environments - including repeatability and testability of platform services
- Exceptionally clear communication, especially when identifying and responding to infrastructure failures
- Experience specifically relating to web hosting at scale, email deliverability, containerisation and continuous delivery
- Managing infrastructure requirements and optimisations based on app performance and user load scenarios
- Distributed systems, database clustering and replication management
- Platform monitoring and observability
- Backup and DR planning, plus common security issues and mitigation strategies
Who you are
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Fiercely independent. All teams at Ghost operate fairly autonomously, and all team members are responsible for helping make decisions about what needs to be done.
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An active collaborator. We look for people who actively want critical feedback on their work early and often, and who get a kick out of refining and pushing what they do as a collaborative process because it creates a better end result.
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Meticulous about quality. Quality matters a great deal in everything we do, whether that's engineering, content or design — we care about creating things which we're proud of.
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A clear communicator. As a remote team which communicates almost exclusively through writing — concise, written communication is essential.
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Humble but opinionated. We enjoy working with smart people who have lots of ideas, yet are happy to discard their former opinions whenever a better way of doing things presents itself.
