Senior Platform Engineer

• Experience in running Kubernetes clusters in production
• Knowledge of Golang, Helm, and Terraform (some knowledge of Python is definitely a plus)
• Production experience in Cilium and/or eBPF and networking in general
• Extensive experience in monitoring systems and their performance
• The ability to debug large and complex systems and solving large problems that affect a wide user base in a simple way
• Experience with image vulnerability scanning and patching strategies for large systems
• Experience / Familiarity with AWS Multi Accounts system designs tools like Crossplane and Control Tower
• Familiarity with Argo Workflows or similar data pipeline as a service tools
• Familiarity working with a variety of Cloud Native projects
• Familiarity with Github Action
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry.

We want to give you a great work environment, support your growth both personally and professionally, and provide benefits that make your time at RVU even more enjoyable. Here are some of the benefits you can look forward to:

• 10% discretionary yearly bonus and yearly pay reviews (based on RVU and personal performance)
• A hybrid working approach with 2 in-office days per week and up to 22 working days per year to “work from anywhere”
• Employer-matching pension contributions up to 7.5%
• A one-off £300 “work from home” budget to help contribute towards a great work environment at home
• Excellent maternity, paternity, shared parental, and adoption leave policy, for those key moments in your life
• 25 days holiday (increasing with years of employment to 30 days) + 2 days “my time” per year
• Private medical cover, critical illness cover, and employee assistance programme
• A healthy learning and training budget 
• Electric vehicle and cycle to work schemes
• Free in-office gym, accessible 7 days a week
• Free breakfast in the office daily
• You’ll be equipped with great technology (choice of Mac or Windows)
• Free access to the Calm and Peppy app for physical and mental health
• Regular events - from team socials to company-wide events with insightful external speakers, we want to make sure our colleagues continue to feel connected. 

Hybrid: 2 days per week in our Tower Bridge office (Tuesday/Wednesday)

RVU

RVU is a group of online brands that include: Confused, Uswitch, Tempcover, money.co.uk, and Mojo Mortgages. We reach the majority of UK households, putting us in a unique position to drive the transformation of the household services sector.

We harness cutting-edge tech and data to help consumers manage their homes more effectively, and we provide some of the UK's biggest companies with unparalleled insight into what customers need and want.

Since our founding in 2018, we've integrated our 5 market-leading digital brands into a powerful data platform, supercharging our capabilities to drive lasting change, and by working with providers and policymakers, we're helping transform entire industries - making markets more competitive and more innovative to benefit everyone.

The cloud infrastructure team - Airship

We're looking for an experienced Platform/Infrastructure Engineer to join our platform team, known internally as 'Airship' (we're considering Senior, as well as Staff)

Airship manages the infrastructure that powers Uswitch and Money.co.uk brands as well the RVU wide AI initiative.

• Excellence: work alongside established and experienced engineering teams, whilst supporting and growing the organisation's understanding and utilisation of modern technology
• Collaboration: work with various cross-functional disciplines across the organisation to make ideas a reality, whilst taking an active role in shaping and delivering the ongoing technical vision of the organisation alongside your peers
• Autonomy: authority over technical strategy, decisions and implementation approach, so you can deliver using practices that align with your preferred ways of working
• Data Driven: utilise rich logs, metrics, and data to monitor and improve system performance, cost, security and reliability
• Culture: enhancing a diverse engineering culture by taking part in various technical catch-ups, working groups, and 'All Hands'
• Experience: enrich RVU's perspective by sharing your experience, knowledge and expertise in a continuous learning environment.

As a key member of the platform engineering team you will be accountable for the following:

• Objective setting, feature ideation, development and measurement
• Architectural decisions and designs of the platform, domains and systems
• Defining, evolving, and applying team processes
• Responsible for the entire stack to meet business requirements
• Building efficient CI/CD pipelines and robust DevOps practices
• Utilising a variety of infrastructure to keep systems performant, scalable & reliable
• Mentoring and coaching engineers, and presenting knowledge and information back to the wider organisation.

As a Staff Platform Engineer at RVU you will be expected to:

• Proactively identify opportunities for improvement across the organisation
• Manage your time effectively between team and organisational level contributions
• Rotate around the business to build relationships and act as a multiplier.

We are committed to Open Source software in order to build services that help millions of customers to save money and make confident decisions. As well as helping our customers, we also give back to the community by open sourcing interesting projects that we build that might benefit others.

Our goal as a team is to enable our development teams to deliver services quickly, reliably and securely. We do this by running multiple Kubernetes EKS and Fargate clusters in AWS, creating common tooling to aid in development tasks, and running shared services such as Opensearch, Envoy, Vault and Prometheus to name a few.

The team has also expanded its scope to simplify Data engineering in the organisation using the same techniques we used to ease creating web applications on data pipelines, leveraging Argo Workflows and Argo Events as well as a recent integration with n8n.

More about us:

Our team has been featured in a few conferences:

CNCF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v9tiGTH86Q

PlatformCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YNXTI8E13s and

We have also been featured in the London AWS Summit 2023 for contribution to the EKS tooling community https://surajnarwade.com/blog/announcing-kubectl-eks-plugin-v0-1-0/

Examples of some projects we have worked on:

Short lived database credentials

Our running services previously relied on having long-lived credentials to access data that were rarely, if ever, rotated. We wanted human and pod identity to be used to grant short-lived credentials based on policies. We used Vault to build a solution to this problem, creating tooling such as vault-creds/vault-webhook to make it as easy as possible for developers to use these credentials with their services. (Blog)

Yggdrasil: Envoy control plane for multi-cluster load balancing

For some of our more important applications it was important to have them survive a total cluster outage. This meant we needed a way to easily route traffic to an application spread out across multiple clusters so we created Yggdrasil, a tool to configure Envoy nodes to route our traffic between clusters based on Ingress resources. (Blog)