Sr. Systems Engineer

Job Description

WHO WE ARE Basis Technologies delivers software and services to automate digital media operations for more than 1,000 leading agencies and brands. Our comprehensive ad tech platform, Basis, supports the planning, reporting, and financial reconciliation of direct, programmatic, search, and social media, all in one place. We are deeply committed to building software that will change the ad tech industry for the better and are equally dedicated to building an inclusive culture of highly motivated individuals who create a positive and supportive environment together. We invest in our culture and support our employees so they can do their best work. Basis Technologies is headquartered in Chicago, and our employees have the flexibility to work in an office location, completely remote, or a hybrid of the two. Please note, we are hiring on a remote working basis only in the U.S. and Canada. ABOUT THE TEAM Technology is at the core of what we do. Basis Technologies innovative Engineering team designs and develops new features and integrations for Basis, our industry-leading, comprehensive software solution. Our platform processes over 300 billion events per day and uses AI and machine learning to automate and simplify the entire digital campaign process. Thanks for checking out Basis Technologies and specifically the Senior Systems Engineer role. Basis Technologies has always been about making people’s lives better – from our employees to our clients. This is exactly what the production operations team tries to do for our software engineers! We work hard to keep our developers productive through tooling, automation and safe visibility into the production environment. We’re in the process of a DevOps transformation. Basis Technologies is further along than some companies but not as far along as we’d like to be. I’d really like your help in getting us further down the DevOps path. WAYS YOU’LL CONTRIBUTE The Production Operations team is responsible for all product-related infrastructure. We think it’s important that a single team manages the entire lifecycle of infrastructure from development to production. This helps us create reproducible environments with very little variance as code moves through the various environments on its way to production. As a member of the team, you’ll be responsible for helping us maintain and improve that infrastructure. One of the ways we improve is by automating as much as possible. As a team, we track the amount of TOIL work the team is doing and try to keep it below 20% of all ticket volume. (And we try to reduce that percentage limit every quarter as well) This keeps us away from busy work and instead focusing on interesting problems. You’ll probably spend more time in a code editor than a Bash shell. You’ll also work with developers on a variety of tasks from troubleshooting production issues, to aiding in design decisions for new features and services. We tend to also lead the discussions around monitoring. These conversations usually go smoothly, but sometimes there might be a disagreement. Being comfortable providing input and supplying supporting arguments is a necessary skill to be successful in this position. We like strong opinions, loosely held.

OTHER WAYS YOU WILL CONTRIBUTE TO THE TEAM ARE BY:

• Participating in technical discussions, providing insights based upon past experience and implementing the best solutions.
• Working across application stack to move software to production, as needed.
• Developing monitoring solutions, which alert the team of potential issues.
• Developing self-service solutions to help increase productivity and reduce unnecessary roadblocks.
• Helping resolve technical issues in production and other environments, which are critical to business needs.
• Developing suites of applications to assist with removing TOIL work. Examples include automated image patching pipelines, automated script execution tying in with JIRA approvals and Bitbucket PR approvals, automated security remediation tools using Lambda functions, etc.

WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TABLE

• Familiarity with code is a must. You don’t have to be the most prolific programmer ever, but you need to be comfortable solving programming problems as well as having an interest in improving your craft. We use Python for infrastructure related code, but experience with any object-oriented language is fine. If you have the concepts down, we don’t mind you learning the syntactical sugar.
• Speaking of which, you must have the capacity for self-learning. There’s constantly new technology we’re evaluating and implementing, and paid classroom training isn’t always an option for us. You must feel comfortable experimenting, reading and learning on your own. We make time during the workday for this type of learning, so don’t worry about being up all night on your days off. When there’s a new technology to learn, a ticket goes in the work queue, and we treat it like any other piece of work.
• Experience with a public or private cloud is strongly preferred. Our work has us always thinking about ephemerality, how to avoid state and how to scale, recover automatically. We use private/public cloud experience as a proxy for understanding this type of behavior.
• Experience working with a container-based platform like Kubernetes is strongly preferred, and EKS-specific experience is a big plus. Basis is on a path to moving much of their platform to Kubernetes and experience with this is something we really value.
• Those are the strong requirements. Where we’re weak as a team is in the areas of networking and database administration. While we’re not novices, anyone with experience in Postgres or advanced networking would be a really big boon to the team!
• We put a big emphasis on empathy at Basis Technologies. You must be able to place yourself in someone else’s shoes and see things from their perspective. We don’t blame people; we blame systems. We don’t say “why did John do X?” we say, “If John shouldn’t have done X, why did the system let him do it?” You won’t be successful if you can’t learn to think in those terms. It’s a muscle that requires constant exercising.
• Self-driven and takes ownership very seriously.

BONUS POINTS

• A mindset for automation
• 3+ years of experience in a public cloud; AWS preferred.
• 1-2 years of experience with Kubernetes/EKS/ECS preferred.
• Strong familiarity with Terraform is a must.
• 3+ years of experience with a configuration Management / Orchestration tool – Salt preferred, but not required.
• 3+ years of experience supporting production web applications is a must, production support of a cloud-native application is a big plus.
• Knowledge of developer tool creation and application architecture design

Our Tech Stack:

• Ruby, Java, Python, and React.js
• Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka
• PostgreSQL, NoSQL
• AWS

$111,000 - $190,000 a year Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Individual salary is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process. The total compensation package for this position may also include commission or bonus, company equity, and competitive benefits. #BI-Remote #LI-Remote #LI-Hybrid ANYTHING ELSE? Don't think you have all the skills required for this role? That's okay, we recognize that experience can be built in many ways. If you have relevant skills that are not reflected in your resume, we welcome your candidacy and encourage you to share more in an optional cover letter, even if your experience doesn’t match our exact requirements. LIFE WITH BASIS TECHNOLOGIES We take care of our people and believe that our success depends on the growth and well-being of each one of our team members. We've been proudly recognized as: Ad Age, Best Places to Work 2023, 2022, 2013 Built In, Best Workplaces 2023, 2022, 2021 Crain's Best Companies to Work for in Chicago 2022, 2021, 2020, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 Crain's Best Companies to Work for in New York 2022, 2021, 2014 Dallas Morning News, Top Workplaces 2021, 2019, 2015 Denver Post, Top Workplaces 2022, 2021, 2020 Denver Business Journal's Largest Employers 2022, 2021, 2020 Fortune Magazine, Best Workplaces 2022, 2021, 2020, 2015, 2014 We provide a thoughtful perks and benefits package including competitive 401k/RRSP matching, mental health support, a funded health savings account, paid sabbatical, generous parental leave, a flexible work environment and time off policy, and more. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building teams that are diverse in thought, perspective, and culture. We celebrate all team members regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, race or cultural background, religion, disability, and age. Basis is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application processes. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected]. Information collected and processed as part of any job applications you choose to submit is subject to Basis' privacy policy that you can view here . Apply for this job