Stack Infra - Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Job content

Elastic is a search company built on a free and open heritage. Anyone can use Elastic products and solutions to get started quickly and frictionlessly. Elastic offers three solutions for enterprise search, observability, and security, built on one technology stack that can be deployed anywhere. From finding documents to monitoring infrastructure to hunting for threats, Elastic makes data usable in real time and at scale. Thousands of organizations worldwide, including Cisco, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, The Mayo Clinic, NASA, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and Verizon, use Elastic to power mission-critical systems. Founded in 2012, Elastic is a distributed company with Elasticians around the globe and is publicly traded on the NYSE under the symbol ESTC. Learn more at elastic.co.

The Stack Infrastructure team plays a critical role at Elastic. We’re not just operators – we’re engineers solving problems to support the wider needs of the engineering team and enable folks throughout the company to get their best work done. Whether this takes the form of scaling existing systems or writing novel ones, we’re a polyglot group that applies software engineering principles to ensure that there’s a proven foundation to build our services atop. We need a phenomenal SRE to help us create and operate the applications that underpin both internal and external services.

What you will be doing:

• Write software to tackle business needs. This might be a network service to serve specific types of content or a web application to host business data for other internal teams. An ability to synthesize requirements from the needs of users can really help here.
• Develop and support production services related to all aspects of the Elastic business, including our downloads, Docker registry, maps service, and much more.
• Participate in on-call rotations maintaining services at scale. We’re an operations team and responsible for the uptime of many systems, but strive to protect the work-life balance for those of us who help keep the lights on. You’ll help carry a culture of responsible operations that tries to constantly improve through refinement over time.
  

What you will bring along:

• Experience building sophisticated and completely automated systems. We operate a wide array of services for a team our size by knowing when to dig into a problem but also where the right scope boundary lies. You’ll need technical understanding in order to succeed in this role both for breadth of the work as well as the autonomy you’ll operate under. Ultimately, keeping things working is core to what we do.
• You should know at least one programming language well enough to be confident in solving challenging engineering problems with it– whether that means writing a RESTful application, a daemon, or a quick script. While we often rely on existing tools and services, we’re also not shy about submitting upstream fixes if we run into problems! We work most often in Python, configuration management tooling like Terraform and Helm, and are experimenting more with newer technologies like Rust.
• We build our systems on Linux. History with a specific flavor or distribution is less important than whether you’re comfortable working in and around Linux systems in general. Automating aspects of administration and monitoring as well the ability to pinpoint problems when they arise are both important.
• A spirit of collaboration and willingness to pull together with the rest of the team. We often turn the magnifying glass inward to identify ways we can improve our processes and avoid chronic problems. You’ll take part in tasks like code reviews and root cause analyses, and we’ll listen to the ways you think we can improve in kind.
  

Experience / interests in these would be nice:

You don’t need to have these items, but these represent the types of work you will do at Elastic

• Search and analytics tools, particularly the Elastic Stack. A love for what our company builds will also help!
• We are a polyglot team; a keen interest in languages would serve you well.
• Working within a distributed and global company. The ability to communicate well with your colleagues is essential in a company spanning across many cultures and years of experience.
• Open-source activity and/or contributions. OSS is at our core. If you have ever written code for an open project, or even just followed one closely you’ll have a good sense for how our company operates and how engineers can thrive here.
  

Additional Information - We Take Care of Our People

As a distributed company, diversity drives our identity. Whether you’re looking to launch a new career or grow an existing one, Elastic is the type of company where you can balance great work with great life. Your age is only a number. It doesn’t matter if you’re just out of college or your children are; we need you for what you can do.

We strive to have parity of benefits across regions and while regulations differ from place to place, we believe taking care of our people is the right thing to do.

• Competitive pay based on the work you do here and not your previous salary
• Health coverage for you and your family in many locations
• Ability to craft your calendar with flexible locations and schedules for many roles
• Generous number of vacation days each year
• Double your charitable giving - We match up to $1500 (or local currency equivalent)
• Up to 40 hours each year to use toward volunteer projects you love
• Embracing parenthood with minimum of 16 weeks of parental leave
  

Different people approach problems differently. We need that. Elastic is committed to diversity as well as inclusion. We are an equal opportunity employer and committed to the principles of affirmative action. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law, ordinance or regulation. If you require any reasonable accessibility support, please complete our Candidate Accessibility Request Form.