Explorer - Pivotal Container Service (PKS)

Job Description

Pivotal’s Story VIDEO

At Pivotal we believe that the world can — and ought to — build software better. We envision a world where engineers experience meaningful and challenging work, collaborating in an atmosphere of kindness and trust with a diverse set of teammates , developing with good tools at a sustainable pace that allows them to go fast forever. The workplace should enable teams to be quick and productive, always learning, and always improving. We want that for the engineers we serve as well as the engineers who are our colleagues.

We provide a platform, methodology, and tools that have proven to be transformational for the world's most established companies. By improving the work lives of their engineers, these companies have unleashed innovation and reduced time-to-market.

We are looking for great engineers to improve the team building our enterprise grade Kubernetes offering, Pivotal Container Service, also known as PKS -- a platform that will transform the experience of deploying, monitoring, and maintaining Kubernetes clusters in large-scale hybrid-cloud environments.

You

You are an explorer at heart. You are also a programmer, but your explorer tendencies shine through. Whether you have held a job with the words “Test”, “Quality” or "SDET" in the title or not, you are driven by curiosity and enjoy exploring the dark corners of complex distributed systems. You have a nose for the little details that make them work well -- or fail. You believe in relentless automation to simplify operating inherently complex things. You have the capacity to develop a strategic vision for the entire software development lifecycle and the acumen to develop the tooling that supports it. You are looking for a collaborative environment building cloud-native distributed systems that enable enterprises to focus on their business rather than re-architecting a cloud platform from scratch. Above all, you love shipping software.

You love learning new programming languages and systems. Furthering your education has always been a goal of yours. Pair programming is either something you enjoy, or something that you wanted to try out. Even if you have not yet worked with Kubernetes, you find deployment, provisioning, and containerization technologies fascinating.

Us

Agile concepts are at the core of our process. We have a whole host of Pivotal Practices around Test Driven Development, pair programming, team retrospectives, technical retrospectives and continuous integration. We are excited to teach these to you and innovate with you on their implementation.

We believe in sustainable pace, so we work 8 hour days, maintaining core hours to support collaboration. Although on-call rotations are part of most teams, incidents are exceedingly rare.

We work collaboratively with our partners from VMware in our Palo Alto office, located in the hills near the Stanford campus. Our teams are small, generally 4-8 people, and are comprised of staff from both companies so we benefit fully from the diverse set of experiences and perspectives we collectively represent.

Making an investment in each Pivot’s professional development improves the organization as a whole. We encourage you to go to conferences, take classes, and read books -- and we’ll give you a budget each year to do it.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities for an explorer are the same as for a software engineer. In fact, the title for this role is in the software engineering family. What sets you apart is not a set of specialized responsibilities but rather your mindset and skills. You:

• Pair with your teammates to develop and release new features and functionality for Pivotal’s enterprise grade Kubernetes offering, PKS
• Evolve processes and automation to increase the efficiency and reliability of the product cycle
• Contribute to a culture of continuous learning and improvement
• Solve customer problems through close collaboration with our product and support teams, including troubleshooting production problems
• Participate in on-call rotations (if called, we will make sure you have adequate recovery time)

Desired Skills / Experience

We know from experience that not ticking every box on the skills sections stops many from applying. You should apply regardless of your self-assessment because we want to hear from you.

• Strong test design / exploration skills
• Professional software development experience with at least one object oriented language like Go, Java, or Ruby
• You know your way around CI/CD platforms and tools
• Demonstrable ability to research problems and break them into discrete parts
• Ability to ramp-up quickly and contribute to a production codebase, contributing as you learn.
• Demonstrated mentor and technical team leader in a professional software team
• Being okay with the uncomfortable feeling that comes from learning new things

Nice to Haves

• BA/BS in Computer Science or related field
• Skilled at drawing on your technical domain knowledge, design patterns, and experience to build maintainable software
• Ability to mentor others in a professional setting
• Operations or Systems Administration experience, particularly on UNIX
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, or cloud deployment technologies
• Experience with Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Worked in a pair programming environment
• Contributed to an open source project
• On-call experience with production grade systems

Pivotal is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that will consider all qualified applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, gender identity or expression, national origin, genetics, age, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.