Platform Engineer

Culture @Plivo:

• Be part of a platforms team where we thrive on these core values : Customer Obsession, Ownership, Result oriented, Excellence, High learnability
• You are expected to be customer obsessed, by knowing who your customer is. Engage with them to understand what their problems are (sometimes customers also don’t know their problems). Then give them ideas about the problems and how your solutions can help them achieve better productivity.
• You must own customer problems as your problems and should have a sense of urgency to fix them maintaining the quality of your solution.
• You must find ways on how to be efficient in your delivery, which can be achieved by exploring the latest tools and technologies. So exploring new technologies is an essential part of your role.
• Be a hands-on engineer, ensure frameworks/infrastructure built is well designed, scalable & are of high quality.
• Build and operate platforms that are highly available, elastic, scalable, operable, and Observable.
• Embrace technology to solve problems. Experiment with new & relevant technologies and tools, and drive adoption while measuring yourself on the impact you and the team can create.
• Build/Adapt and implement platforms and tools that empower the Plivo engineering teams to self-serve/manage the infrastructure and services owned by them.
• You will identify, articulate, and lead various long-term tech visions, strategies, cross-cutting initiatives and architecture redesign.
• Document your work and decision-making processes, and lead presentations and discussions in a way that is easy for others to understand.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Designing & implementing the infrastructure
Platform engineers design and implement the infrastructure that an application will run on. They select the appropriate hardware and software components, configure the networking and storage resources, and create security policies. They also consider factors like reliability and disaster recovery when designing the infrastructure to ensure that the infrastructure is scalable and can handle the expected load.
• Monitoring the infrastructure performance
Once the infrastructure is in place, the Platform Engineer must monitor its performance to check whether the application is running smoothly. They use various tools and techniques to monitor the infrastructure, such as log analysis, performance metrics, and alerts. If any issues are detected, the Platform Engineer investigates and resolves them as quickly as possible to minimize the impact on the application's performance.
• Automating the product development lifecycle
Platform Engineers automate the testing, deployment and configuration management processes to focus on more strategic tasks like infrastructure design and monitoring.A platform engineer is expected to create an automated deployment process that can perform all tasks automatically, using tools such as configuration management software, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and container orchestration platforms.
• Making appropriate updates in infrastructure and applications
Platform engineers maintain the underlying infrastructure including hardware, software, and storage resources to ensure the infrastructure’s reliability, scalability, and security. As new vulnerabilities are discovered, the engineers keep the infrastructure up-to-date with the latest patches and security updates to mitigate potential risks. They also test the updates before deploying them to ensure that they don’t impact the application's performance negatively.
• Debugging and resolving application issues
Platform engineers identify the root cause of the issues and then work on implementing the required changes to fix them.
• Keeping up with the latest trends in the industry
Platform engineers must keep up with the emerging technologies to ensure that the infrastructure and applications they manage are up-to-date and efficient. Keeping up with the latest trends also helps identify opportunities to improve the application's performance and reduce costs.
• Coordinating with team members to discuss technicalities
Platform engineers work closely with other members of the development team, such as software engineers and QA analysts, to discuss technical issues and find solutions that meet the infrastructure’s needs. Effective communication and collaboration help them develop and maintain the applications successfully.

Skills needed:

• Be a developer by mind and operator by heart. You must think from a developer perspective, not from an operator perspective.
• Hands-on experience with AWS and Kubernetes or similar cloud/infrastructure platforms is a must. Must have a working knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS and HTTP protocols to understand how data is transmitted and received over a network. They should know how to configure network settings, set up firewalls and ensure that network connections are secure and stable.
• Hands-on with DevOps principles and practices ( Everything-as-a-code, CI/CD, Test everything, proactive monitoring, anomaly detections etc)
• Have a deep understanding of CI/CD concepts.
• Know how to configure and manage the pipelines to ensure that software updates are deployed quickly, safely and efficiently.
• Experience in developing cloud-native applications is a plus
• Proven experience consuming and producing APIs & SDKsDeep understanding of OS/virtualization/Containerization, network protocols & concepts
• Exposure to modern-day infrastructure technologies, Expertise in building and operating distributed systems.
• Hands-on coding in any of the languages like Python or GoLang, Java, Typescript.
• Must have an in-depth understanding of code debugging and troubleshooting skills
• Familiarity with software engineering practices including unit testing, code reviews, and design documentation.
• Platform engineers need to be adept at managing projects. This means they should have the ability to define project goals, create timelines and allocate resources.
• Platform engineers need to have strong attention to detail. As one, you should understand complex technical requirements and ensure that every aspect of a project is thoroughly tested and validated.
• Adapting to new technologies and trends let platform engineers stay ahead of the curve and be proactive in identifying potential challenges and opportunities. It allows them to improve performance, enhance the user experience, increase efficiency, and gain a competitive advantage.
• Platform engineers should possess monitoring and problem-solving skills to strengthen their footprint in the industry.
• Platform engineers also troubleshoot complex technical problems and work collaboratively with cross-functional teams to resolve them.

Ideal Candidate:

• 7+ years of experience as a Platform engineer or DevOps role.
• Have experience with AWSKnowledge in system design involving computing, memory, storage, and networking for performance optimization, exposure to accelerators an advantage
• Knowledge of microservices architecture, configuration, and deployment with their underlying technologies, including Terraform, Docker/Kubernetes, and Kustomize.
• Should have good concepts around workflow management software and built solutions around CI/CD and alert automation.
• Should have working knowledge of Kubernetes internals and Flux CD.
• Good communication and interpersonal skills capable of maintaining strong relationships.
• Candidate should have a good ability to articulate things and present with good documentation
• Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Good Debugging and troubleshooting skills.
• Most importantly should be able to demonstrate above mentioned core values in his/her actions of the past.

Perks & Benefits:

• Empowerment to take ownership, plan and execute.
• Get to work in an environment, where we give importance to productivity per employee.
• Medical and Life Insurance
• Open culture and working with a young and dynamic team
• Career advancement opportunities
• Generous leave policy