Team Infrastructure

Site Reliability Engineer (Remote US)

  • Department

    Engineering

  • Location

    Remote (US)

  • Timezone(s)

    GMT -5:00 to -8:00

About PostHog

PostHog helps engineers build better products. We are a single platform to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features. We give engineers product analytics, session recording, feature flags, A/B testing, event pipelines, SQL access, and a data warehouse… and there’s plenty more to come.

PostHog was created as an open-source project during Y Combinator's W20 cohort and had the most successful B2B software launch on HackerNews since 2012 - with a product that was just 4 weeks old. Since then, more than 50,000 companies have installed the platform. We've had huge success with our paid upgrades, raised $27m from some of the world's top investors, and have shown strong product-led growth - 97% driven by word of mouth. 

Despite the 📉 tech market, we're default alive and doing better than ever! We average 10% monthly revenue growth and are on track for $10m ARR in early 2024. While others are focused on layoffs and struggling to grow into huge valuations, we're focusing on building an awesome product for end users, hiring a handful of exceptional team members, and seeing fantastic growth as a result.

What we value

  • We are open source - building a huge community around a free-for-life product is key to PostHog's strategy.

  • We aim to become the most transparent company, ever. In order to enable teams to make great decisions, we share as much information as we can. In our public handbook everyone can read about our roadmap, how we pay (or even let go of) people, what our strategy is, and who we have raised money from. We also have regular team-wide feedback sessions, where we share honest feedback with each other.

  • Working autonomously and maximizing impact - we don’t tell anyone what to do. Everyone chooses what to work on next based on what is going to have the biggest impact on our customers.

  • Solve big problems -we haven't built our defining feature yet. We are all about acting fast, innovating, and iterating.

Who we’re looking for

We’re looking for a security-focused Site Reliability Engineer to join our Infrastructure team in scaling the foundations of our highly available and flexible cloud platform that PostHog runs on. At the core you will be part of the team responsible for maintaining our AWS/Kubernetes-based infrastructure and making sure it scales to the next 10x milestone.

This isn't someone who walks around telling people to change their passwords regularly. You see security and compliance as a feature of the platform rather than a checkbox to be filled, developing novel solutions that keep engineers moving fast, yet safe.

What you’ll be doing

  • Improving our constantly evolving cloud infrastructure to support new products and ideas at an infrastructure level

  • Solving security and compliance issues with technical solutions that don't hinder the pace of product development

  • Working with tools such as Envoy, ArgoCD, Karpenter or anything else that enables us to reliably and safely deploy changes

  • You will work closely with Product and Pipeline teams to provide guidance and build solutions to allow self-service of essential infrastructure and monitoring tools

Example issues

Almost everything at PostHog is built in public - this isn't as true for infrastructure work as it often involves sensitive content. Nonetheless here are some example headlines of recent work:

  • Secure all internal services with Tailscale

  • Enable Canary deploys for a gradual rollout of services

  • Migrate to Kafka S3 tiered storage

  • Configure PostHog to deploy mono-repo services only when they individually change

Requirements

  • Experience managing large-scale cloud infrastructures (AWS in particular)

  • Experience with a range of database technologies such as Postgres, Kafka, Redis, Clickhouse, S3, etc.

  • Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, and associated tooling such as Helm

  • Motivation to work with other engineering teams to understand their goals and raise the bar of what can be solved by infrastructure

  • Infrastructure as Code with tools like Terraform is your default way of working

Nice to have

  • Experience working with SOC2, HIPAA or other regulatory frameworks

  • Experience scaling and working with Clickhouse

Salary

We have a set system for compensation as part of being transparent. Salary varies based on location and level of experience.

Learn more about compensation

Location (based on market rates)

The benchmark for each role we are hiring for is based on the market rate in San Francisco.

Level

We pay more experienced team members a greater amount since it is reasonable to expect this correlates with an increase in skill

Step

We hire into the Established step by default and believe there's a place to have incremental steps to allow for more flexibility.

Salary calculator

  1. Benchmark (United States - San Francisco, California) $236,000
  2. Level modifier 1
  3. Step modifier 0.95 - 1.04
Salary$224,200 - $245,440plus equity

Benefits

  • Generous, transparent compensation & equityGenerous, transparent compensation & equity
  • Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)Unlimited vacation (with a minimum!)
  • Two meeting-free days per weekTwo meeting-free days per week
  • Home officeHome office
  • Coworking creditCoworking credit
  • Private health, dental, and vision insurance.Private health, dental, and vision insurance.
  • Training budgetTraining budget
  • Access to our Hedge HouseAccess to our Hedge House
  • Carbon offsettingCarbon offsetting
  • Pension & 401k contributionsPension & 401k contributions
  • We hire and pay locallyWe hire and pay locally
  • Company offsitesCompany offsites

Get more details about all our benefits on the Careers page.

Your team's mission and objectives

Make deploying, scaling, and managing PostHog easy, fast, and reliable.

💪 Deploy with confidence (follow up from Q1)

Our deploy speed keeps us moving fast but bigger changes would benefit from better tooling to gradually roll out, validate and roll back if necessary.

  • Support new rust capture to full release using our new ingress system
  • Finalize our canary deploy process

🚨 Improved alerting and monitoring

We have a pretty solid alerting and monitoring solution but there is always room for improvement. There is as much here about scaling to our number of products and teams as there is technical scaling.

  • Improve process around planning and detecting gaps in our alerting
  • Improve capacity planning (process as well as implementation)
  • Alerting on reverse proxy solutions
  • Make the internal tooling around creating alerts to be more opinionated
  • Swap to a more scalable solution for log aggregation

🔒 Deeper Security

Security is a never ending journey. We want to do some work to make sure we are ahead of the curve.

  • Extend secret management tooling to more areas
  • Improved logging and auditing

💰 Continued cost control

  • Focus on our biggest cost centers where we can make the biggest impact

Interview process

We do 2-3 short interviews, then pay you to do some real-life (or close to real-life) work.

  • 1
    Application(You are here)

    Our talent team will review your application to see how your skills and experience align with our needs.

  • 2
    Culture interview30-min video call

    Our goal is to explore your motivations to join our team, learn why you’d be a great fit, and answer questions about us.

  • 3
    Technical interview45 minutes, varies by role

    You'll meet the hiring team who will evaluate skills needed to be successful in your role. No live coding.

  • 4
    PostHog SuperDayPaid day of work

    You’ll join a standup, meet the team, and work on a task related to your role, offering a realistic view of what it’s like working at PostHog.

  • 5
    OfferPop the champagne (after you sign)

    If everyone’s happy, we’ll make you an offer to join us - YAY!

Apply

(Now for the fun part...)

Just fill out this painless form and we'll get back to you within a few days. Thanks in advance!

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