Principal Engineer - Platform/SRE

We are looking for a hands-on (Senior to Principal level) Platform Engineer to join our Platform team with expertise in Security, Site Reliability, and Developer Experience. In this high-autonomy role, you’ll work on both big-picture concepts and hands-on tasks daily. For example, from shaping the team’s technical vision & strategy to troubleshooting CORS headers in development environments in an application’s JavaScript plugin.

Your main priorities will be to ensure that our systems are secure, reliable, performant, and scalable and to continuously improve Ecosia’s developer experience. You will do so while becoming a multiplier to your peers. Through your contributions and technical leadership, you will enable a culture of engineering, security & operational excellence and have a tangible impact across the organization.

The Platform team is one of the key foundational teams at Ecosia. We support over 40 engineers in their end-to-end development workflows. We want to enable self-service and frictionless continuous deployment practices. Further, we secure, deploy, maintain, and monitor all cloud infrastructure that services our customers. Our main driving tenets are:

• Security, stability, and reliability come first

• Constantly improve our operational practices

• Choose simplicity

• Deeply understand our evolving systems

• Automation is better than repetition

• Self-service is better than a help desk

If the idea of having a high degree of autonomy, solving complex architectural & security problems, being a multiplier to your peers, and having a positive impact on climate change sound exciting to you, we would be excited to chat.

What you’ll do

• Shape Platform Team’s technical vision and strategy.

• Improve Ecosia’s overall security posture. Set organizational security standards and best practices, including security audits and testing, incident response processes, and disaster recovery plans.

• Design, write, test, review, build, deploy, and maintain infrastructure and tooling. Innovate on existing software and systems. Understand where to extend, where to refine or remove, and where to start fresh.

• Drive adoption of SLOs across the engineering organization.

• Improve developer productivity and time to market.

• Explore novel software development and green computing practices and integrate them in our stack.

• Participate in our paid out-of-office hours on-call rotation. Own and improve incident management processes.

• Advise Product and Engineering stakeholders about the technical feasibility of business ideas. Look ahead to identify technical challenges we need to overcome soon. Engage with external partners to improve their integrations with our software systems.

• Make people around you better. Share and promote engineering and security best practices across teams.

What you bring

• You have a high bias for action and have proven to dive deep and overcome business-critical technical challenges. You can break down ambiguous problems and propose innovative solutions.

• You have expertise in cloud security, Zero Trust, IAM, and embedding security best practices throughout the software development lifecycles.

• You have a documented history of designing and shipping software to production for at least 8 years, as part of SecOps, DevOps, Platform, SRE, or Backend roles.

• You are proficient in Python, JavaScript (or TypeScript), or Go. You are curious to work with any of those languages.

• You are comfortable going up and down the technical stack, including user-facing and backend code.

• You possess effective communication skills with the ability to convey complex concepts to non-technical audiences. You enjoy working collaboratively as part of cross-functional teams.

• You thrive in an environment of evolving requirements and demonstrate a hands-on approach to problem-solving.

Process:

1. Intro call with our Talent Acquisition Partner (30m)

2. Coding Interview (max 1h15min)

3. Systems Design Interview (max 1h15min)

4. Final Interview, Company and Engineering Culture (max 1h- 1h15min)

Why Ecosia?

• What if your job made a real difference in the climate crisis? Join Ecosia and help plant millions of trees where people and ecosystems need them most.

• We are a diverse team, committed to equality, equity, and inclusion, with members of various backgrounds: sexual orientations, genders, ages, races, ethnicities, nationalities, physical and mental disabilities, family structures, and religions.

• We offer you the opportunity to balance work with other parts of your life. (Flexible working hours, more vacation days than the law requires (30 days/year on a five-day week), designated Focus Times, remote work options) (not applicable to freelance contracts + different labor laws apply in other countries).

• Moving to Berlin for the first time? We welcome everyone and offer relocation support and visa/work permit assistance to new employees and their loved ones coming from abroad and within Germany (applicable for unlimited contracts).

• Our green benefits program, including subsidized public transport cards and bike inspection services, supports your sustainable living choices, varying by location (not applicable to freelance contracts).

• We support your professional growth through monthly learning days, hack days, online and physical libraries, a 2000€ development allowance per year, continuous feedback, etc. (not applicable to freelance contracts).

Q&A

How many people work at Ecosia?

116 (November 2024) - our departments include Engineering (incl. Platform), Product (incl. Design & BI), Marketing, Trees, Operations, and People and Culture.

Where is Ecosia based and what kind of a work set-up do we have?

We are a remote-friendly company with one office in Berlin-Wedding. People come to the office or work from home, as per their wishes and/or circumstances. Some roles require presence in the office at least from time to time. The Talent Partner will tell you more.