DevOps Engineer

In a nutshell

We're looking for an experienced DevOps or systems engineer to join our four-person remote DevOps team, reporting to the Engineering Manager. You'll help us keep our platform running well and mature it further by adopting the best practices, technologies and standards. You'll need solid Linux experience alongside a working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), server hardware and networking.

Technical skill isn't everything, though. Communication, teamwork and a friendly manner matter just as much to us, because we want to keep BrightLocal a genuinely nice place where people love coming to work. We're looking for engineers who are flexible and who share our belief that any job worth doing is worth doing well. In practice, that means you may dip into software development, talk to colleagues across the business, and help with IT support when it's needed.

We're a People First, AI-driven company. People come first, and we also expect you to use AI extensively to speed up your work and improve its quality, so proficiency with AI tools in your day-to-day work matters to us.

Scope of Duties and Responsibilities

In this role you'll take on the following primary duties and responsibilities, including but not limited to:

Core Responsibilities

Production infrastructure. You'll maintain our production infrastructure and expand our automation and virtualization initiatives.

Automation and configuration management. You'll automate existing systems and manage configuration using Ansible.

Developer enablement. You'll build, improve and maintain pre-production environments and CI/CD pipelines used by our development teams.

Observability. You'll improve logging, monitoring and alerting across our platform.

Reliability and support. You'll monitor and support production systems, taking your turn on the on-call rotation, and troubleshoot issues as they arise.

Security and maintenance. You'll address security issues and perform system upgrades in line with our standards.

Role-Specific Tasks

Keep the platform running

• Maintain our production infrastructure of 70+ physical servers, and expand our automation and virtualization.

• Troubleshoot Linux systems, server hardware, networks and related applications.

• Address security issues and perform system upgrades.

• Monitor and support production systems, including taking your turn on the on-call rotation.

Automate and improve

• Automate existing systems using Ansible.

• Build development environments and CI/CD pipelines, and work with developers to adopt and improve existing ones.

• Support development teams by building, improving and maintaining pre-production environments, occasionally dipping into the code.

• Improve observability across logging, monitoring and alerting.

What success looks like

In your first six months, you'll be comfortable maintaining our production infrastructure, taking your turn on the on-call rotation, and delivering automation improvements with Ansible. You'll know your way around our environments and be a reliable pair of hands when something needs troubleshooting.

By twelve months, you'll be actively improving our pre-production environments and CI/CD pipelines, raising the bar on observability, and colleagues across the business will turn to you for the tricky infrastructure problems.

Performance Standards

Your performance will be assessed based on, but not limited to, the following:

Quality and accuracy. You work to a high technical standard, making changes to production systems carefully and documenting them appropriately.

Timeliness. You handle tasks, incidents and on-call responsibilities within agreed timeframes and service expectations.

Productivity. You manage a fair and consistent workload and progress assigned work reliably.

Policy compliance. You follow our security, change-management and operational policies.

Independence and collaboration. You work effectively both independently and as part of the DevOps team and the wider business.

Required Skills, Qualifications, and Experience

Minimum Qualifications

Education. No formal educational qualification is required. You'll be assessed on demonstrable skills and relevant experience.

You'll need to have:

• Extensive experience in Linux/Unix system administration (Ubuntu is our flavor of choice).

• Experience with a scripting or programming language such as Shell or Python; deeper programming experience is a plus.

• Experience with system automation tools. We use Ansible, but if you bring other strong skills and are willing to learn it, we'd still like to talk to you.

• Experience with deployment and CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins and Ansible.

• Experience working with Docker.

• An understanding of network technologies and services such as TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP and SSL, and the ability to configure them.

• Database knowledge covering configuration, administration and disaster recovery (MySQL in particular is a plus).

• Knowledge of computer hardware and networking systems, and the ability to troubleshoot complex hardware and software issues.

• Proficiency with AI tools and an open mind about how to apply them.

Nice to have

• Experience with high-load, high-performance production systems, including their maintenance and optimization.

• Experience with the ELK stack.

• Knowledge of HashiCorp tools such as Vault and Consul.

• Knowledge of RabbitMQ and Redis.

• Experience with AWS, DigitalOcean or Google Cloud.

• PHP, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript or other programming languages.

Competencies

• Flexible and happy to help where it's needed, whether that's development, a conversation across the business or an IT support issue.

• A clear communicator who works well in a small, remote team.

• Someone who shares our belief that any job worth doing is worth doing well.

• Open-minded about AI and how to apply it to your day-to-day work.

How you'll work

This is a remote role based in the Philippines, working Philippine day-shift hours as part of a remote DevOps team. There's occasional travel to our Valencia office, up to a few times a month, and to the data center when hands-on work is needed.