JELLYVISION NEEDS A SENIOR SITE RELIABILITY ENGINEER

We here at Jellyvision are the proud parents of ALEX®, an interactive employee communications platform that happens to share some DNA (and a sense of humor) with the smash-hit trivia video game YOU DON’T KNOW JACK®, created by Jellyvision's founder. ALEX makes navigating tricky decisions—like choosing and using employee benefits or improving your financial wellness—easier, faster, and more helpful, not to mention entertaining. The success of the ALEX platform has exceeded our wildest dreams (except for the part right before we woke up where our mom was riding a giraffe) which is why we need talented folks like you to help us help ALEX take over the world…er…continue to grow and succeed.

SO WHAT'S THIS JOB ABOUT?

The SRE organization at Jellyvision provides services, frameworks, tooling, and pipelines to enable the Engineering organization to develop and deploy production applications quickly and safely. We achieve this by actively promoting and contributing to our evolving application architecture, teaching and implementing engineering best practices, and creating self-service tools for our developers to keep unnecessary obstacles out of their way on the way to production.

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, you are a jack of many trades, equally comfortable writing application code, managing infrastructure-as-code, or architecting cloud applications for high-availability. If you are looking for an opportunity to gain new experience, work with great people, play with some great technology, and become an even better engineer, then this job’s for you.

You and your team's responsibilities include:

Designing modern containerized or cloud-based applications.  We are cloud-native in everything we do, and we are transitioning rapidly towards containerized workloads.  More than anything else, you need to understand how these systems work.

Building and supporting our automated CI/CD pipeline.  The SRE team strives to get code off of our application developers’ computers and into production as quickly and safely as possible.  You will help us build the tools needed to make that goal achievable. 

Identifying and fixing system issues while keeping a cool head.  Things don’t always go exactly according to plan, so it’s important that you can stay calm while digging into issues that come up to solve them, identify root causes, and plan the work necessary to keep them from happening again.

Software development -- the “dev” part of DevOps!  As should be obvious already, we are constantly iterating on our systems and developing new tools to automate repeatable tasks and make our lives as easy as possible. You’ll be writing code for applications, infrastructure, pipelines, and any other tooling necessary to make our platform safer, faster, and more resilient.

What tech skills would suit this role best?

Cloud computing platforms, especially AWS.  We’re not exclusive, but we use a lot of the tools in the AWS toolbox, making the most use of EC2, ECS, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, S3, and RDS.  Our technology roadmap includes becoming more cloud-agnostic, so if you know GCP or Azure that may come in handy, too!

Applications that scale.  We make as much use of horizontal scaling as we can, which means having to manage a dynamically changing system.  Familiarity with monitoring, log aggregation tools, dashboards, and lots and lots of metrics is very useful – as is the ability to identify root causes and fix problems across distributed systems.

Several different programming languages.  We are a polyglot company, and you will be working with Ruby, Python, and Javascript (and we may even have some PHP in a dusty corner, but don’t tell anyone).  You both need to be talented with at least some of these to keep up and eager to learn new ones as they come along.

Common DevOps tools.   If Hashicorp makes it, we probably use it. In general, we try to do everything as code, and make use of things that support that mindset.  Experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible, Packer, and Terraform is important.

What other skills would be applicable to this position?

Great Communication Abilities: At Jellyvision, communication is at the heart of what we do. You will be working with a diverse group of individuals who are peers, developers, product owners, or account managers. You will speak in faces and through digital interfaces. We believe a great communicator can be a game changer by eliminating easy to avoid mistakes as well as ensuring that the right work is being done and no work is being duplicated.

Leadership and Mentorship: As a senior SRE, the responsibility of guiding our junior engineers falls partly on your shoulders. We want you to be excited to share your expertise and experience with teammates and engineers of all skill levels, through both formal training sessions and everyday collaboration. Additionally, you should be able to take charge of a team project and see it through, getting buy-in and enlisting help as needed.

Data-Driven Decision Making: While monitoring any application you will see bleeps and bloops on graphs which can indicate anything from poor performance to potential security threats. As a senior SRE, you should be able to read deeply into the data you are presented to make appropriate decisions that will shape the future of our applications to make them faster, more secure, and more resilient.

ANYTHING ELSE?  Yes. We share a commitment to excellence and a desire to work in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere, so we only hire nice, bright, funny people who are willing to work hard.  Our credo is a simple one: be helpful. And we think we can be most helpful if our workforce is as diverse in thought, perspective, and culture as the people who use our products. We are looking to add amazing folks to our team who will bring diversity across many lines, including race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity, sex, and country of origin.

ARE THERE ANY PERKS? Yes, we love perks.

• Competitive pay, 401(k) with matching benefits. We pay 100% of the cost of premiums for medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance for our employees (as long as you qualify for our tobacco-free discount; if you’re a tobacco user, your medical premiums will be higher than $0). We also cover a really nice chunk of the cost of premiums for spouse/dependent medical, dental and vision insurance.
• Casual dress and a flexible schedule. Come in a sweatshirt, jeans, whatever, like everyone else here.
• Creative work environment. We are lucky to work in a place that is full of intelligent, talented and innovative folks. Although most hours the place is deathly quiet (we're a focused bunch), this is punctuated with hilarious outbursts and general merriment, which makes a nice way to spend the day.
• Free food. Every week, we stock our kitchen with free healthy snack foods, and we have a catered lunch every other week to give people a reason to hang out and eat together.
• Easy transportation and lots of love for folks who bike to work. We’re really close to the North/Clybourn Red Line stop and the Halsted (#8) bus (right by the Apple Store and Mega Whole Foods too), and we have a transit FSA that allows you to dedicate pre-tax dollars to public transportation expenses. A number of our employees like to bike to work, so we also have bike storage, showers and lockers in the office.  And for those without their own bike in the city, we offer free Divvy memberships – complete with Jellyvision bike helmets you can borrow from the office.
• Did we mention our yoga class? We bring a pro instructor right to the office. Fully subsidized by Jellyvision and fully optional, btw.
• Oh! And we have a massage chair. Not just any massage chair, my friend. It’s the HumanTouch HT 5320 WholeBody™ Massage Chair (should probably be updated). Feeling a little stiff? Sit down. Relax. Feel better? Good. Okay, back to work.

AND HOW DO I APPLY?

We look forward to hearing about you and what you do. Make sure your application includes:

• Your resume 

You will receive an auto-reply confirming that we've received your application.

Please know that every single application we receive is read by a real live human being. However, that kind of thoughtful review takes time, so it may take us a little while to get back to you (but we will, we promise). In the meantime, NO FOLLOW UP PHONE CALLS OR EMAILS, PLEASE. It’s not that we don’t love hearing from you. It’s just that time spent responding to follow ups could be spent…well…reading your application. Please rest assured that if you received a confirmation from Recruiting Robot, we’ve got your application, and will get back to you really soon. We knew you’d understand. 

If you still have pressing questions in the meantime, please feel free to check out our handy-dandy FAQ page! 

Thanks for your interest in Jellyvision!