Platform Engineer, Parse.ly

Parse.ly, a part of WordPress VIP, is the real-time content measurement layer for the entire web. Our analytics platform helps digital storytellers at some of the web’s best sites, such as Arstechnica, The New Yorker, TechCrunch, Wired, The Intercept, Slate, and many more. In total, our analytics system handles over 65 billion monthly events from over 1 billion monthly unique visitors. Parse.ly and WordPress VIP are part of Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Simplenote, Jetpack, Longreads, Day One, PocketCasts, and more, with a mission to make the web a better place. Automattic is a distributed and global-first company, with more than 1900 Automatticians in 96 countries speaking 120+ different languages.

About the Role

With 40% year-on-year growth, we are expanding our team and looking for a platform engineer to join us. The platform team is responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the development solutions for the Parse.ly real-time analytics systems. The team applies DevOps and SRE practices such as Infrastructure-as-code, automation, pervasive monitoring/alerting, and close collaboration with application engineers. The team works with the Parse.ly Backend, Frontend, and Machine Learning Engineers and owns Parse.ly’s distributed cloud environment. This environment involves 400+ servers running in 9 Availability Zones and 3 Regions in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It also includes AWS-managed services such as RDS, EMR, ElastiCache, and Athena.

Parse.ly’s platform engineering team already makes use of technologies like CI/CD, Ansible, Terraform, Nomad, Docker, and AWS services to maintain Parse.ly’s infrastructure and security. As a Platform Engineer at Parse.ly, you will be expected to master these technologies.

As an experienced Platform Engineer, you will help build the platform that hosts all of our applications and services — while ensuring consistent uptime, provable reliability, and top-rated performance of our streaming data systems.

What you’ll do

For this role, you should already be a senior platform engineer who wants to work with data at scale. You will:

• Implement and manage infrastructure as code practices using Terraform and Ansible to automate the provisioning and configuration of resources. Ensure scalability and reliability of our cloud infrastructure platform AWS.​​
• Develop and maintain monitoring and observability solutions using tools like Datadog, Grafana, log management, and traces to track platform performance and health, and report on enhancements to key Service-Level Objectives (SLOs)
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate the build, test, and deployment processes with GitLab CI.
• Identify and eliminate manual, repetitive tasks through automation. Develop scripts and tools to automate infrastructure management, configuration, and maintenance.
• Work with developers to establish practices for deploying and managing apps. Help them use containerization tech such as Docker and Nomad for reliable and scalable app deployment.
• Gain operational expertise for core data infrastructure technologies, including Amazon S3, Kafka, Zookeeper, Storm, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Redis, Postgres, and Spark.
• Contribute to a Python software development project in a production environment.
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation.

Parse.ly Technology Stack

We currently adopt the following technologies across the Parse.ly platform:

• Python & JavaScript
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Databases like Elasticsearch, Redis, Cassandra, and Postgres
• Frameworks like Django, FastAPI, and the PyData stack (e.g. Pandas)
• Kafka, Storm, Spark in production atop large data sets (terabytes per day)
• System management with Ansible, Terraform, and Nomad
• Containerized workloads and services

Salary range: $70,000-$170,000 USD - Please note that salary ranges are global, regardless of location, and we pay in local currency.

Read more about our compensation philosophy and benefits.