Core Platform Engineer

About Us/Popsa

Popsa is a high-growth tech scale-up based in Soho, London, with a strong international presence. Our mission is to help people relive their best experiences. We do this by developing our creative platform which leverages advanced machine learning and computer vision to curate user’s photos and automatically design photo products for them.Our product range includes photo books, calendars and wall art, all delivered through an award-winning user experience. There are currently around 55 people working within Popsa, with around 25 working directly in product development and tech disciplines.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Platform Engineer to join our Core Platform team at the associate level. Our Core Platform team ensures smooth technical operations within our business, with responsibility for platform reliability, security and performance. The ideal candidate for this role will have a passion for cloud infrastructure and scalable systems. You will play a critical role in building and maintaining the infrastructure that powers our innovative user-facing apps, as well as working to directly improve the developer experience for everyone in the product development and engineering part of our organisation.

Core Platform Team Responsibilities

• By joining the team at an associate (entry) level, it is highly desirable for you to have hands-on experience with as many of the following areas as possible.
• Initially your areas of focus will be CI/CD, but will grow to include other areas as you progress. We will also provide training, development and mentorship to grow successful candidates in the following areas.

CI/CD and Deployment

• Implement and manage CI/CD pipelines
• Develop and maintain infrastructure for integration and staging environments

Cloud Infrastructure

• Administer production AWS and GCP services
• Develop and maintain services with event-driven technologies such as API Gateway, DynamoDB and SQS
• Configure and manage Kubernetes clusters
• Deploy infrastructure as code using Terraform

Observability and Monitoring

• Implement and manage observability tools like FluentBit, CloudWatch Grafana, Prometheus and Jaeger
• Configure and manage alerting tools enabling the team to respond to incidents

Networking and Security

• Manage communication within VPC and service-mesh technologies such as Envoy
• Configure and maintain load balancers, reverse proxies, working to ensure secure network configurations

Performance Optimisations

• Collect and analyse metrics/data using tools like Prometheus and AWS Athena
• Identify opportunities for caching, refactored code and other performance improvements based on data insights

Application Development

• Build and deploy Dockerised applications and services
• Write and maintain backend services using Go

Desired Experience

• Familiarity with observability tools such as FluentBit, Cloudwatch, Grafana, Prometheus and Jaeger
• Experience with networking in cloud environments, including VPCs, service meshes and load balancing
• Ability to collect, analyse and use data to drive technical decisions and optimisations