DevOps Engineer

We’re fully remote, and we’ve built the company this way since the start in 2009, so you won’t be on your own, without support, or missing out on discussions at the office – there is no office.

We rely on good communication & collaboration (both within and across teams), and we’re still small enough that you’ll meet everyone.

If you haven’t already, find out more about PKB – our service makes life better for millions of patients, healthcare professionals and carers. Our roll-out in NW Londonmakes us the UK’s largest patient portal, and we’re expanding into a global market. We start all projects, new features, and even bug fixes by understanding who our work will affect.

Our work focuses on a few major things:

expanding and improving the web application: patients, professionals, customer admins, and carers all use our web interface to work with & understand the data in patient records.
integrations: customers send us medical data via our HL7v2 API, or via integrations with other major providers. We’re expanding a FHIR-based REST API (and our new Angular-based web app uses it already).
and architecturally – every “feature” project normally also includes related platform upgrades; we’re gradually moving up to nation-scale patient populations.

We talk every day (daily stand-ups at a minimum; other regular calls only if they have clear goals/focus – ad-hoc calls any time it’s faster than typing).
Everyone is generally available for scheduled calls during core hours, something like 9 am – 4 pm London time. Most of us are parents, so we may fill in extra time in the early morning or evening.

We communicate mostly via chat, with periodic calls & screensharing.
We track epics & stories in Jira; PRs go through GitHub.

We follow a scrum development process, estimating work complexity (not time) and iterating two weeks at a time, and all teams work closely with Product to understand & help shape projects from early stages.

Our current infrastructure

Multiple on-premise clusters for production systems
Multiple clusters for development and testing
VMs and dedicated servers
Docker EE for orchestration and cluster management
Relatively large PostgreSQL installations (including live replicas)
Monitoring and alerting based on hierarchical Prometheus installations and Grafana
Automated backups and manual disaster recovery plans/rehearsals

We need your help with

Improving performance and horizontal and vertical scalability
Further automation of our disaster recovery plans and rehearsals
Understanding, finding and addressing security issues
Evolving monitoring and alerting to gather more insight and service robustness
Continuously reducing friction in the software/system lifecycle (frequent deployments, upgrades at different levels)
Help evaluating our options when scaling up our system. Should we utilize public clouds? Go hyperconverged?

Requirements

We are looking for you if you

are a software engineer at heart who can write code well
know your limits and can ask for help – the scope of this position is very wide and we don’t expect you to be an expert in everything (or even in most things)
are looking constantly for opportunities for automation
understand the devops culture
have wide range of interests in technology – we are not a very large firm (yet), therefore quick learning and ability to pick up new information is important
are better than average in estimation (nobody is actually good at it; we know that)
enjoy and are good at finding and correcting problems you have not encountered in the past
run Linux on one (or many ) of the computers you have at home
have more than two years of experience
are hungry for new challenges

Benefits

We provide you

outstandingly supportive and helpful environment
competitive salary
flexible work hours (and of course flexible work environment as we are fully remote)
opportunity to really make a difference – your work will make life better for millions of patients
space to grow and shape your career path – we’d like you to join PKB, not just for a particular role; you will have a lot of influence over the responsibilities you pick up
freedom in choosing your tools (both hardware and software)

We need diversity in our team to build a great global service, so we work actively to exclude bias from our hiring process and from our work culture. Your race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, national origin, age, disability, or any other aspect of your personal life & history that aren’t harming your work will not block you from being hired and advancing your career with us. You will be treated with respect, kindness & a willingness to learn, and we’ll expect you to treat your colleagues the same way.

When your personal life does affect your work (it happens; more than half of our dev team have small children at home, for example), our smart & flexible policies will help by default, and we’ll work with you to adapt your work/life integration sensibly.