Flourish Senior DevOps Engineer

Do you love modern web technologies? Are you a team player who likes solving difficult problems together? Do you want to join one of the UK’s most exciting tech start-ups and play a key role in developing an ambitious product with a global impact?

Flourish is empowering the world to visualize and tell stories with data. It enables anyone to create beautiful graphics, presentations and interactive stories without coding. Since our launch in 2018, more than 500,000 registered users have produced more than 5 million graphics, which have racked up more than ten billion views.

Our customers include leading newsrooms (such as BBC and FT), major corporates (such as Goldman Sachs and Moody’s), NGOs (Amnesty, Rockefeller) plus universities all over the world.

We’re looking for a DevOps engineer to join the team.

The role

You’ll be responsible for maintaining the reliability of the Flourish platform and associated services – and improving our technical infrastructure, including deployment, continuous integration, monitoring and logging.

You would be the lead engineer in this area, under the guidance of Head of Development and CTO. We expect there to be career development options as this areas of the company grows, though in the first phase at least it will be thoroughly hands on.

About you

You are an experienced DevOps engineer, looking for a new challenge in a fast-growing software company. You’re passionate about making systems run reliably and improving technical infrastructure and processes.

Importantly, you’re excited by Flourish and the opportunity to make it better. You’re a friendly colleague and you work well in a close-knit team.

Must-have skills

• Knowledge of AWS at the level of the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer (whether or not you have the formal qualification)


• Experience of Linux system administration


• Troubleshooting skill: the desire and tenacity to get to the bottom of service issues

Nice-to-have skills

• Strong shell scripting


• Experience of infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g. Terraform or CloudFormation)

Person attributes

• Confident to take the lead on complex technical issues


• Good at communicating and collaborating with colleagues


• A systematic approach to solving problems


• Curiosity and a desire to learn new skills

About us

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  Our tech stack: Flourish is a Node.js app deployed on AWS (currently using Elastic Beanstalk in a blue/green configuration). We use:

  
  
  
  
  • RDS PostgreSQL as the main database
  
  
  • ElastiCache Redis as a session store
  
  
  • CloudWatch for monitoring and log storage
  
  
  • Lambda functions connected to Slack for non-urgent alerts
  
  
  • PagerDuty for urgent alerts
  
  
  • AWS CloudFront and Cloudflare CDNs for published content
  
  
  • Cypress, GitHub, CircleCI and Sentry in the development workflow
  
  
  
  


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  Our company: Flourish is a small team combining decades of collective experience in development, data, design, visualization and journalism/publishing. Read more about the team.

  
  


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  Our culture: We’re a friendly and supportive group that values kindness, honesty and fun. We’re open and try new things with enthusiasm. And we’re high-momentum, focused on delivering magical products that our users love. We socialise as a team at least once a month.

  
  


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  Our interview process: We make our hiring process fast and straightforward. Typically there is brief initial call and online screening test, followed by an interview designed to be rigorous but friendly and collaborative.

  
  


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  Our location: We are largely a UK-based team, with a few exceptions. We used to be based in a fun office in Clerkenwell in central London. This was closed at the start of the COVID crisis. We intend to get a new office in London in 2021, most likely in the Shoreditch area, but we do support remote working.

  
  

Benefits

• Salary from £60 to £80k depending on skill and experience


• Remote working is welcome (the majority of our development team is remote), though after lockdown lifts, it would be a plus if you could be at our London office every few weeks for sprint planning/retros and socials


• Flexible hours, and respect for work/life balance (not “startup hours”)


• Lots of potential for career progression


• 30 days’ annual holiday, plus public holidays

To apply

Send a CV, and a covering letter explaining why you’re interested in this role and how you meet the description above, to [email protected]. Please use the subject line “DevOps engineer”. Got questions about the job? Feel free to email us for a chat.

We’re committed to equality and diversity in the tech industry, so we’ll be especially happy to see applications from under-represented backgrounds.

Sorry, but we won’t be able to sponsor visas for this role: please do not apply if you do not already have the right to work in the UK. We are not accepting applications from recruitment agencies for this role.

Not right for you?

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