Staff Backend/DevOps Engineer

at  Ready Education Inc

WHO WE ARE

Ready Education is the leading mobile student engagement platform on a mission to improve student success in higher education worldwide. Our products connect students with their peers and faculty, allow easy management of courses and finances, and help 700+ institutions strengthen their campus community. We are a global, remote-first team.
Ready is growing rapidly, both organically and inorganically, and has successfully completed four acquisitions in the past year. We have a diverse and world class team poised for our next phase of rapid growth.

LIFE AT READY

The values we live by at Ready Education
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- Put Student Success First - Ready Education exists to improve student success.
- Accomplish More As a Team - our team here at Ready is made up of passionate, hardworking people who support, care for, and challenge each other to achieve wins together. We learn from each other and embrace creative tension to ensure the best idea wins. We collaborate to solve problems together. In this role, you will work closely with the Product & Engineering team on the technical components, as well as the Customer Success team on the customer experience.
- Have a Learning Mentality - we are looking for intellectually curious people who never stop learning and growing and who embrace change, which is essential at a constantly evolving tech company. You will continuously push yourself to improve and evolve.
- Move Fast and Innovate - to be successful at Ready, you will need to be self-motivated and able to work autonomously. You will need to have excellent judgement and decision making skills to solve problems and move forward quickly.

ROLE PURPOSE

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Staff Engineer to join our dynamic team. The ideal candidate will be a seasoned professional with a strong background in managing and optimizing SaaS services across multiple geographic locations. As our Staff Engineer, you will play a crucial role in architecting, implementing, and maintaining robust solutions, ensuring the scalability, reliability, and security of our cloud-based infrastructure. Your work will not only directly and tangibly impact all engineers on the team, but also the success of millions of students across the world. The Staff Engineer will lead both in designing software and infrastructure architecture.

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES

In terms of the role and responsibilities, you will

• Work with other engineering leaders to help mentor a team of engineers to drive collaboration and continuous improvement in DevOps practices. You will lead by example.
• Design, build, manage, and improve the core infrastructure used by all of Ready’s engineering teams
• Ensure high availability, performance, and reliability of SaaS services through effective monitoring, alerting, and disaster recovery planning.
• Help debug production issues across various services and levels of stack, and improve the observability and traceability of our systems to make the process more efficient
• Help scrutinize, reason, and drive the technology and architecture choices we make in building our platform
• Collaborate with the security team to conduct regular security assessments and audits. Ensure compliance with industry regulations and standards relevant to SaaS offerings.
• Drive initiatives to reduce cloud costs and increase efficiency and scalability.

ESSENTIAL REQUIREMENTS OF THE ROLE

What we’re looking for

• At least a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Solid background in software development with substantial experience with at least two of the following programming languages: Java, Python, or Go. Familiarity with .NET is a plus.
• Proven track record of designing and implementing scalable, high-performance systems.
• Strong understanding of software architecture principles and best practices.
• Have at least 5 years experience in a DevOps Engineering or Infrastructure Engineering role, with a focus on cloud-hosted service-based technologies
• Have extensive experience operating with Amazon AWS
• Have extensive experience building highly available, secure, and cost-efficient infrastructure that utilizes a variety of technologies and data stores, including private cloud networking topologies, load-balanced web applications.
• Strong knowledge of infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Expertise in containerization and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Have experience administrating and optimizing common databases such as MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB
• Experience with monitoring and logging tools (e.g., Prometheus, Elastic).
• Familiarity with configuration management tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef).
• Have good administrative Linux skills.
• Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define technical requirements and drive system architecture decisions.
• Work from or at least adhere to the Eastern Time Zone.