Platform Engineer

Welcome to the future of energy
We are both an electricity retailer and a tech platform and we think there is no better way to address our greatest challenge, climate change, than with the combination of those two.
Through our proprietary tech platform, Kraken, we are changing the way people interact with their energy company - by making it approachable, low cost, easy-to-understand, and most importantly, 100% renewable.  We’ve distinguished ourselves by being named 2020’s Energy Provider of the Year, which highlights our commitment to exceptional customer service. In many markets we are a leading employer on Glassdoor for best places to work.
We're looking for a Platform Engineer to join the team and help us build and scale “Kraken”, a cloud-based energy platform for interacting with both consumers (via the web, mobile and smart-meters) and the industry (e.g. data flows, consumption forecasting, trading on the wholesale market). We're an innovative and customer-focussed company, helping to drag the utilities industry into the 21st century.
Our teamAll technology is written and maintained by a multi-discipline engineering team of around 150 people. This includes server-side, client-side, and mobile engineers working closely with UX experts, copywriters and designers.
We follow a Kanban-like approach, using Google docs and Asana to specify and manage work; Github, CircleCI, Kubernetes and Terraform Enterprise as part of an immutable-infrastructure, continuous delivery pipeline; and Datadog, Sentry and Cloudwatch to measure performance and monitor production.
Our technologyOn the server-side, we mainly use Python. Most of our websites are powered by Django, Django-REST-framework and GraphQL. We use Celery, RabbitMQ and SQS for background processing and have a data platform that uses Pandas, Numpy and Jupyter for analysis and forecasting.
We are heavy users of AWS. We host our applications in Kubernetes (EKS) and on EC2 and deploy and manage them with Helm/ArgoCD, or Packer/Terraform.
Client-side, we use React, Redux and SASS with increasing amounts of Next.js; our mobile apps are built using React Native.

What you'll do

• Identify, design and lead on initiatives that help us scale
• Support, maintain and expand our AWS infrastructure
• Ensure our systems and services are both reliable and performant
• Collaborate with Developers on new features and services
• Work with the Security team to ensure that the platform is secure
• Help solve interesting and difficult problems. There’s a great opportunity for disruption in the global energy market 

What you'll need

• Excellent Linux skills. Our services run on Linux, so you’ll need to be confident administering and troubleshooting Ubuntu and/or CentOS
• Good experience with AWS. We use a lot of different AWS services and not just the standard few.
• Terraform experience. We use Terraform Enterprise to roll out changes to our cloud
• Python and Django (or equiv. Web framework)
• PostgreSQL, or similar RDBMS, particularly in Amazon RDS
• A good understanding of troubleshooting distributed systems
• Experience managing and supporting a large scale internet facing service
• This position is open candidates residing in the US. Central and Eastern time zones strongly preferred. 

What would help

• Networking knowledge, particularly routing and VPNs
• An awareness of security processes and DevOps security tools
• Experience with RabbitMQ, or other messaging queues
• Celery and async processing
• Docker and Kubernetes. We use Amazon EKS.
• An understanding of Data Science / Big Data tooling and methods

What you'll love about us

• Great medical, dental, and vision insurance options including FSAs
• Unlimited paid time off — we know working hard means also being able to recharge as needed, we trust our employees to get the work done and take the time they need.
• 401(k) plan with employer match.
• Parental leave. Biological, adoptive and foster parents are all eligible. 
• Pre-tax commuter benefits.
• Flexible working environment: you need to shift around your schedule? You do you, we genuinely believe in work/life balance. 
• Equity Options: every Octopus employee owns part of the business. We’re a team, working together towards huge goals. Every person is crucial to our success, you should be rewarded as such. 
• Modern office or co-working spaces depending on location.
• Wondering what the salary for this role is? Just ask us! When on a call with one of our recruiters it's something we always cover as we genuinely want to match your experience with the correct salary. The reason why we don't advertise is because we honestly have a degree of flexibility and would never want salary to be a reason why someone doesn't apply to Octopus - what's more important to us is finding the right octofit!

If this sounds like you then we'd love to hear from you.
Studies have shown that some groups of people, like women, are less likely to apply to a role unless they meet 100% of the job requirements. Whoever you are, if you like one of our jobs, we encourage you to apply as you might just be the candidate we hire. Across Octopus, we're looking for genuinely decent people who are honest and empathetic. Our people are our strongest asset and the unique skills and perspectives people bring to the team are the driving force of our success. As an equal opportunity employer, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected attribute. Our commitment is to provide equal opportunities, an inclusive work environment, and fairness for everyone.