Platform Engineer

Welcome in the world of Solar Energy!

At Solar Monkey we love making an impact by accelerating the transition to solar energy. We do this by giving solar installers super powers with our innovative software. This allows them to work much more effectively and install even more solar installations. With our software installers can easily design, sell and maintain solar power systems remotely. We are active in 5 countries. We have seen the Dutch market grow x5 within 5 years and are ready to see the same impact in the rest of Europe!

As a Senior Platform Engineer you will be part of the Platform team that is responsible for improving and maintaining our (cloud) infrastructure and providing the development teams with tools and advice on how to deploy their services, and how to keep sight on its metrics.

As you can see in the description of our stack here (https://engineering.solarmonkey.nl/jobs/), we run a moderate cloud stack on the Google Cloud Platform and use Hashicorp’s tools for deployment. In our case a Consul + Vault cluster, and Nomad to schedule (container) jobs. That has proven to be a stable environment without too much maintenance. Most of the work is in improving the experience of other developers, and making it easier for them to take ownership over their domain, including the operations side.

What you will be doing

• Create well-tested, -debugged and -documented configurations and software for stories from the backlog, taking into account our best practices.

• Proactively improve the infrastructure and related code as a whole by proposing and executing on better practices, taking into account other levels of proficiency in the team.

• Make sure knowledge is shared in the development team by actively engaging in pull request reviews and pair programming.

• Actively engage with others to continuously strive to improve processes, create efficiencies and reduce costs and bottlenecks.

• Contribute in coordinating support and feature requests by interacting with stakeholders and documenting them.

• Clearly communicate problems and results with the rest of the team and company.

• Take responsibility for and become proficient in the tasks we share with the team like the concierge and release master role.

How do we work together?

Our main work is based on our backlog and roadmap, which the Platform Team decides on together. Often, you will pair program with a fellow platform team member, or someone from product development. We also recently started practising Test-Driven Development. For our main app, we have a weekly release process using our own CI implementation, but we would like to start moving towards Continuous Deployment. We do have on-call duty only for office hours which is shared between all engineers from both Product and Platform teams. We have a clearly defined framework to help you grow as an engineer.

What's in it for you?

• Stock Appreciation Rights 

• 25 holidays excluding the national bank holidays

• Available budget for personal development at 4% of gross salary

• A Macbook

• The opportunity to work hybrid, with a budget to set up your home office

• Monthly social events and quarterly strategy days (company wide events also for remote workers). Enough opportunity to have fun with your colleagues ;)

Compensation

The envisioned salary range for this position is €55-80K per year, depending on experience. Besides that we offer Stock Appreciation Rights and a 4% learning budget. You’ll get an Apple MacBook Pro to work on.

What makes working at Solar Monkey a unique experience?

It's very simple! We believe that work should be fun. A happy and satisfied team is our number one priority. Our culture can be characterised as informal, no-nonsense and pleasantly warm. Our working environment is dynamic, has a clear structure and short communication lines. We are a close-knit team, where everyone works together with mutual respect. Thinking along and showing initiative is strongly encouraged in everybody, because we do it together! We like to have a lot of fun together, not just during our strategy days or events, but also on regular working days. Working in a team is just as natural for us as generating solar energy.

In SolarMonkey we aim to include all of society. We strongly reject all types of discrimination and welcome all types of talent. For us, inclusion is everyone’s job. We’re proud to work here, it unifies us as a community and brings out the best in individuals and teams.

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for someone who likes creating stability and efficiency in a cloud environment. Someone who is versatile at the shell to debug weird network issues, but who hates snowflakes. Someone who likes developing tools that are used by other developers, and makes their lives easier. Someone who masters our cloud and has at least 5 years of experience in the field.

Required skills

• You have experience managing a cloud platform (GCP/AWS/OpenStack) from code.

• You are proficient in Python (or another server-side language like Go or Ruby, and willing to learn Python).

• You can design a “stack” for a new service so it is scalable and trustworthy.

• You have experience with container based deployment.

• You are able to work with a diverse group of people. You’re not a rock star or code-ninja, you’re a human, of some form 🙂.

• You can clearly outline your thoughts about a technical solution in written form (and diagrams are always a bonus!)

• You actively engage with others to optimise processes and reduce bottlenecks.

• You are able to pick up new things quickly.

• You want to work 32 to 40 hours a week.

• You work from location +/- 2h CET time zone.

• You are not looking for a 9 to 5 job and are willing to sometimes work outside of office hours.

Wishlist

• You have experience with Hashicorp’s Consul, Vault & Nomad, Google Cloud Run and/or Kubernetes.

• You have experience with Terraform.

The application process

Applying

Please through the button on the right and let us know:

Who you are.

Why you? What will you bring to Solar Monkey?

Why this job post and not another?

What relevant (for us) work you have done. Preferably something you are excited about.

Please limit it to 500 words or so.

Neuro-scientific games

After resume selection, you'll participate in quick neuro-scientific games to highlight your potential and personality objectively. This promotes fair evaluation and transparency in line with our values. You will receive your game results too.

Phone screen

If your application is clear and seems to match what we have in mind, we will call you for a short (20m) phone call. If it isn’t, we will let you know by email, if possible with some helpful feedback about the reason for rejection.

Take home exercise

In preparation for this interview we ask you to shortly build a solution using a take home exercise and send that to us.

2 hour interview

In this (real-life or remote) session we will discuss the problem you tackled earlier, and dive into how you solved it, why you solved it that way and what you have learned from it.

Last chat
We might have one more interview with you to discuss more details about your experience.