Backend Engineer - SRE

Ahrefs is looking for a backend developer with deep understanding of distributed systems, OS fundamentals, reliability, networks, and a taste for simple and efficient architectural designs. Our backend is mostly implemented in OCaml with some C++, we use Puppet and OCaml for infrastructure as code, and we run on baremetal servers without any clouds (and we set up our datacenter halls ourselves).

Our SRE team is focused on making operations and infrastructure definition simpler, easier to understand and maintain, making it more reliable, more secure, more performant and more observable. We do this by building better internal developer and devops tools, analyzing system requirements and automating everything, in the end improving the infrastructure foundation for the development teams to build upon.

In this role, be prepared to deal with 400+ petabytes of storage, OCaml and Linux on a daily basis (and CPU bugs occasionally).

This role is ideal for a SRE with a backend engineering background or a backend engineer who has an interest in SRE.

Technologies

• OCaml (main day-to-day programming language)
• Puppet (understand concepts, read and integrate with existing puppet code)
• Distributed systems (everything is distributed here)
• Modern C++ (investigating issues in external C++ codebases)
• Linux kernel code (tracking down performance regressions, debugging, etc)
• Clickhouse
• OpenTelemetry
• No docker
• No cloud

The ideal candidate is expected to:

• Build monitoring and operations tools for developers
• Build configuration as code tooling and use this tooling to setup infrastructure for product development needs
• Work with the wider engineering team to understand what improvements are required
• Take care of the large heterogeneous production infrastructure under high load
• System and infrastructure analysis to understand performance, security and reliability improvements through the stack and coordinate with other engineering teams to implement them