Cloud Engineer
Knack
Hi, thanks for reading about our Cloud Engineer opportunity! We're glad you're here.
We're Knack, a code-free platform used by thousands of customers — from non-profits to the world’s biggest companies — to easily build custom apps, workflows, and databases.
We need a brilliant Cloud Engineer to help us meet the enormous challenges around managing the performance and reliability of thousands of data-driven applications.
This role can encompass multiple titles like DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering. We’re less interested in conforming to a specific title, and more interested in a passion for using AWS services platform engineering to solve big problems.
And did we mention we’re looking for someone who is self-motivated and independent? This is a 100% remote role, with a culture that gives you the autonomy to define how you can do the best work of your career.
Knack is and has always been a 100% remote company. We started as a remote company so we know what it takes to ensure the success of a distributed team. TLDR: that essentially means that each member of the team has a huge amount of autonomy and ownership to define their work and impact.
We also emphasize the journey over the destination. We're looking for applicants that are opinionated about what matters to them and want to join a fun, passionate, close-knit crew of high-quality human beings that, above all, enjoy working together. Hopefully, that's you!
In this role, you will:
- Manage and improve our AWS infrastructure. This includes execution, but also taking the initiative to suggest improvements to architecture and cost allocation.
- Leverage Terraform to automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure resources.
- Help us improve our logging, monitoring, visualization, and alerting to better detect and respond to issues more quickly.
- Reduce barriers for engineers to deploy and optimize systems, and actively build bridges between security, development, operations, qa, and customer technical support.
- Help us refactor our CI/CD out of Jenkins, moving towards reusable pipeline code for developers and QA to self-service their own CI/CD pipelines.
- Help our customer support team with technical challenges, creating automation where possible, adding documentation where not.
- Develop software for automation, developer tooling, and self-healing systems.
We’re looking for someone who is:
- An AWS expert. You’re deeply familiar with many AWS services and how to get the most from them.
- Deeply familiar with modern architecture paradigms such as microservices, pub/sub, event-driven, and serverless, as well as the appropriate times to leverage them.
- Experienced with leveraging Terraform to automate infrastructure. You’ve used Terraform at scale and have valuable lessons to impart from that experience.
- Experienced with implementing and maintaining container-based systems.
- Experienced as a meaningful contributor to data-driven infrastructure at scale.
- Interested in building reusable developer-friendly infrastructure platforms over brittle systems-heavy solutions.
- Experienced in (or is interested in) helping organizations to shift left, and enabling developers to build and manage their own infrastructure.
- Has experience in (or is interested in) collaborative OOP-based software development, beyond simple scripting.
- Humble but opinionated. You have lots of ideas, yet you are comfortable shifting directions when a better path emerges. In short, you have “strong opinions, loosely held”.
- Is an active collaborator. You ask for feedback on your work early and often, and you get a kick out of a collaborative process because it challenges you to do better work.
- Is hungry for meaningful work, and space to do it. Knack is a complex product in a complex space and the work is extremely challenging - but also deeply rewarding. Knack makes a major impact in the work of thousands of companies and organizations.
Our Stack
We’re evolving and simplifying, and so is our stack! At the moment though, our stack consists of:
- AWS and Terraform - we’ve drunk the kool-aid and use AWS across the board
- Graylog, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Prometheus, Grafana - monitoring, and logging
- Node.js and Golang - APIs, backend, and platform development
- Docker, ECS - continued container expansion
- PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Solr, Redis - data persistence
- Github, Jenkins, Playwright, Cypress, Ghost Inspector, Mocha - deployment and testing
About Knack
Knack launched in 2012 with one simple goal: to enable everyone to do amazing things with their data.
Knack makes it easy for anyone to build applications and workflows to make their data useful. Our customers use Knack to run their processes, departments, or even their entire companies.
We've been growing steadily since as we've built our team, perfected our product, and nailed our product-market fit.
So how are we different?
- We're bootstrapped: we've had to build something our customers actually pay for. This changes how you do things.
- We're 100% remote: and have been from the beginning. Every decision we've made has been based on optimizing our remote operations.
- We take culture seriously: We’re not one of those companies that just slaps some cultural adjectives down in a handbook article then calls it a day. We use our cultural values as our north stars and even have an always active culture committee that is dedicated to ensuring that our culture is maintained and evolves as we grow.
- We're all a little weird: and we like it that way. We're more than just chat avatars; we've all gotten to know each other, have grown together, and love working with each other.
- We enjoy the journey: we're in this for the long haul. We're not chasing an exit or the next round of funding. We're building something we're proud of and want to keep improving on.
Benefits & Perks
The biggest benefit of Knack is getting to alongside our awesome team of Knackleheads. We're a funny, humble, talented team of delightful human beings that, above all, enjoy working with each other, growing with each other, and supporting each other.
These benefits aren't that bad either, though:
- Define your work: find the location, environment, and schedule that is best for your life and work. It's not about separation, it's about optimization. Our only rule is an overlap zone of 11am to 4pm EST.
- Unlimited Paid Vacation: take the time you need to stay motivated, charged, and balanced. You'll get required days off for birthdays and knackiversaries.
- Paid Corporate Retreats: we get together twice a year at amazing locations to do normal human being things in person. We pay for your flight, lodging, and meals.
- HealthCare: we offer health, vision, and dental, covering 75% of the premium for you and your dependents (spouse + children).
- 401(k): we give you the option to automatically deduct funds from your pay to stash them away for your golden years (currently non-matching, but stay tuned!)
- Equal opportunity: we push everyone to maximize their impact on our product and company--we strongly value all of our people, regardless of title or seniority.
- Family support: we offer a generous paid family leave to welcome any new additions to your family.
- Tech: we provide a top-of-the-line PC or MacBook
We are also passionate about learning and professional development. We provide multiple learning opportunities and encourage each other to continuously learn and grow:
- Long-term growth and learning plans, with regular check-ins to help you level up on what's important to you.
- Have executive-level visibility into how the company is run and performing, including revenue.
- Use an annual allowance to stay on top of your game with training, classes, conferences, and workshops.
Note for international applicants: We are only able to offer a majority of these benefits to US hires.
Diversity
We believe that different perspectives and backgrounds are what makes a company flourish. Knack welcomes all applicants regardless of race, gender, orientation, sexual identity, economic class, ability, disability, age, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, or status. We're proud to be an inclusive company with values grounded in equality and ethics, where we embrace diversity.
How To Apply
Are you currently so excited to apply that you can barely type? Then we want to hear from you!
We review applications in batches, so don't worry if you don't hear from us right away. Qualified candidates will move on to video interviews to discuss the position in detail, meet the team, and talk through the fit. We're also big believers in paid trials whenever logistically possible.
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