We’re looking for an experienced and engaged Platform Engineer (m/f/d) to help us shape, build and improve our unified platforms and their integrated capabilities to enable Springer Nature’s product teams to focus on delivering value
About the role
As a Platform Engineer within SN Technology Engineering, you will play a key role in shaping, building, and improving Springer Nature’s unified platforms and the integrated capabilities that empower product teams across the organisation. Our platforms serve hundreds of developers globally and support 100s of millions of euros in revenue. Your work will directly contribute to providing a reliable, secure, standardised foundation that accelerates product delivery.
Together with the team, you will share the responsibility of developing and improving our platforms along with maintenance tasks, documentation, running updates and keeping our systems secure. While you help to push the Platform-First-Strategy, you prioritise Platform as a Service (PaaS), drive adoption of best-in-class developer tools, and continuously improve the platform’s usability, performance, and security.
As a department, we focus and engage on providing a unified and standardised platform by using modern and open standards. Our approach is encompassed by defined core capabilities, such as observability, continuous integration, security and storage. We therefore closely collaborate in our department so that the core capabilities are not only tightly integrated but also provide a unified experience for/to the product teams in Springer Nature.
About the team
Engineering Enablement consists of around 60 people, spread over teams that closely collaborate to fulfil our mission. As part of the Engineering department at Springer Nature Technology, we provide platform engineering expertise to support core capabilities and use cases across run time to databases to observability, ci/cd, and SRE.
You will join a multidisciplinary team with different nationalities, backgrounds and experience levels. We are a very distributed department, sometimes we travel to work with each other in person. We are based around the globe with main locations in London, Dordrecht, Berlin, and Lisbon.
Our Technology
We have built platforms serving hundreds of developers around the world at scale. We are making more and more use of Kubernetes as a backend container platform and integrating this into our platform offering. We are leveraging the power of Kubernetes to build a new PaaS that will co-exist with the current Cloud Foundry Platform, as well as managing an internal database platform that runs over 1,200 database servers.
Out tech stack focuses on:
- Kubernetes, Kubevela, GKE
- Grafana LGTM stack, Sentry, Open Telemetry
- Concourse, GitHub Actions
- Terraform, Ansible
- Postgres, Mongo, MySQL
- GCP, AWS
Role Responsibilities:
- Meet your delivery and participation responsibilities as a contributor to an engineering team, working on the Engineering Platform.
- Build, operate and maintain the core capabilities and components of the Engineering Platform
- Treat the Platform and its components as a product, with real customers instead of just infrastructure to manage.
- Build and design automation, tooling and self-service mechanisms, so product teams can move faster.
- Own and operate platform services end to end, this may include: managing Kubernetes clusters, contributing to automation and tooling, or building and operating CI/CD and Observability systems.
- Provide technical support and consultancy to product teams, and playback what you learn from them into the product roadmap.
Experience, Skills & Qualifications:
Essential:
- You have experience operating, automating, and maintaining cloud infrastructure (in either AWS or GCP), including contributing to system architecture and design.
- With expertise in at least one of the following: (storage, routing, cloud networking, org policy definition and automation, IAM)
- You have programming experience with Golang, Python, JVM-based languages, or similar modern languages.
- You have experience with general automation patterns and version controlling
- You have experience in managing Kubernetes deployments, as well as writing Kubernetes operators or controllers.
- You have taken part in projects from design to production.
- You've worked in multi-disciplinary teams focused on delivering shared outcomes within the software delivery lifecycle.
Desirable:
- You have written and maintained code that interfaces with the Kubernetes API, such as operators, controllers, add-ons, etc.
- You have written applications using Go and have a thorough understanding of its language features and idiomatic practices.
- You can demonstrate your experience with some of the core technologies in use (Kubernetes, Kubevela, GKE, EKS, Grafana LGTM stack, Sentry, Open Telemetry, Concourse, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Ansible, Postgres, Mongo)
- You have experience in building APIs, exposing components in a programmable way, to be consumed by humans and machines.
What you will be doing
3 months
You'll work in collaboration with your team to gain a working context of our environment, get to know your colleagues and customers, and fill gaps in your skills and knowledge.
You will:
- Take an active role in your team.
- Understand the business value we deliver
- Develop an understanding of our customers and their needs.
- Develop understanding of our Engineering Platform and key strategies.
- Learn about the software development lifecycle in Springer Nature.
- Gain knowledge of the key technologies and tools in use by your team (e.g., Cloud Foundry, GKE, EKS, etc)
- Participate in team ceremonies and day-to-day work.
- Create a development plan with your line manager to expand your skills and knowledge.
3–6 months
You'll be leveraging your understanding of our context to contribute to the department's priorities, while continuing to build relationships and skills.
You will:
- Contribute to platform improvements.
- Use the right technology solutions to solve the problem at hand.
- Have a good understanding of the context the team is working within.
- Be able to properly understand and discuss business requirements with stakeholders and product owners.
- Become familiar with the security, compliance, and accessibility risks that affect our products, and understand how to mitigate them.
- Manage container-based runtime platforms confidently.
- Participate in architectural discussions.
- Understand the goals of the company and how the department helps to deliver them.
- Continue deepening your skills and knowledge.
6–12 months
You'll be recognised as a key contributor to your team, driving the platform forward. You will be working with your team and our customers to accelerate business delivery in a low-risk, scalable manner.
You will:
- Improve system performance and reliability.
- Take active steps to ensure that risk is mitigated in the products your team ships.
- Shape evolution of our Engineering platform.
- Confidently support and enable delivery through good practices.
- Participate in user research to better understand our users' needs, when applicable.
- Provide useful and actionable feedback to team members and foster a culture where team members proactively give and receive feedback as a norm.
- Help grow the internal culture through events such as technical share-backs, 10% time etc.
At Springer Nature, our mission is to be part of progress – and that begins with inclusion: of people, perspectives, and ideas. We believe that diverse perspectives drive progress, and we are committed to creating an environment where people and ideas can flourish. If you have any access needs related to disability, neurodivergence or a chronic condition, please contact us so we can make all necessary accommodations.
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