Senior DevOps Engineer

at  Presail

ABOUT US

At Presail, we make Web3 investment infrastructure. We’re on a mission to make it possible for retail investors to invest in startups that are not yet openly traded on public exchanges, and use Web3 technology to remove the barriers in traditional finance that have made venture investing inaccessible to anyone other than the rich and well-connected.
Presail was founded in 2021, originally built to help crypto investors correctly report their taxes. After working on an investor-oriented product for a while, we realised that the best way to serve the investors in the Web3 space was to make tools for the projects and the investment funds they were investing in. Today, our platform helps investment communities and projects raise funds, vest tokens, and manage their investors, in a safe and compliant way. The verdict from our customers is clear: Presail helps them stay on top of everything, it reduces scams and fraud, and it plays a crucial role in their compliance work.

THE ROLE

We’re building an OPS team to work alongside our existing product development team. As our Senior DevOps engineer, you will be the first person in the company to work exclusively on this new team.
We have big ambitions to distinguish ourselves as a stable and reliable actor in the often chaotic web3 space. These ambitions extend to our OPS work.
Your primary responsibility will be to ensure our app is reliably served to our customers. Since we deliver a fundraising solution operating on the first-come-first-serve principle, where only a limited number of investors are able to invest in any given deal, we deal with large spikes in page traffic. When a popular fundraiser is about to open, thousands of investors will be waiting to enter our app at the exact same time. We combine several tools to mitigate and control the incoming traffic today, but we have not yet cracked the code to ensure we handle them without issue, every time.
Most of the time, the traffic is entirely organic, but sometimes we are targeted with DDOS attacks. Today, we mitigate these effectively using Cloudflare. We want to build a rig that can withstand these attacks, by instantly and automatically mitigating them, without our users noticing any downtime.
Another crucial responsibility for the OPS team will be ensuring that our app is secure. We want to comply with the highest industry standards, and our goal is to apply for SOC2 certification in 2024. Getting there means developing, implementing, and documenting extensive security processes that cover areas such as data processing, data retention, and disaster recovery, to name a few.
We also intend to schedule regular audits with security auditors to proactively detect and pre-empt ways to exploit us or our users. Actors of similar size in the space have become targets of attacks from sophisticated hacker groups. You won’t have to field the entire responsibility of keeping our app secure alone, but you should feel comfortable in your ability to combat and prevent common security threats.
Lastly, the OPS team will be responsible for ensuring we maintain development and test environments that are reliable and easy to use for the development and QA teams.
If you’re excited about the prospect of demonstrating your leadership skills or making your mark on a company, this will be an exciting opportunity. As the first member of a brand new team, we expect you to take on big responsibilities relatively early after joining, but you will also be given a great degree of freedom to solve problems the way you want them to be solved. You also won’t have to bear the responsibilities alone. Until we scale the OPS team with more members, you will collaborate closely with our CTO and Principal developer.
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WHAT YOU’LL DO

Here are some examples of the challenges the Presail team has worked on recently, which fall within the OPS team’s area of responsibility.

• Implemented Cloudflare waiting rooms to control spike traffic during popular fundraisers, as a contingency mechanism to ensure our servers aren’t completely overloaded by fundraising-related traffic spikes.
• Implemented controls and policies in Secureframe, with the goal of becoming SOC2 compliant.
• Set up custom domains for premium customers, and automated parts of the setup process to make it more efficient.
• Discussed moving our servers from Heroku to AWS, along with our Postgres and Redis databases. We’re open to switching cloud providers, if you are!
• Configured our Redis databases to ensure they are properly scaled to meet spikes in traffic
• Responded to reports of users getting false positives from antivirus and Web3 wallet security software. Reached out to the relevant companies, and work out solutions with them to prevent further false positives.