DevOps Engineer

Prodigy Finance is a platform that delivers socially responsible financial services; making it possible for students from more than 150 countries to fulfil their dream of studying at the world’s top universities and schools by financing their international postgraduate studies, whilst delivering competitive financial and social returns to alumni, institutional and private investors.

This borderless and innovative model enables education loan financing to students from across the globe, whilst using predicted post-degree affordability rather than present-day salary. Since 2007, Prodigy Finance has extended over US$1 billion through the platform to fund over 20,000 students.

We are funded by some of the best, pre-eminent institutions in the world including Index Ventures, Balderton Capital, RMIH, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and more recently DFC and CPP.

What will you do in the role?

As a DevOps Engineer, you will take a leading role in instilling a DevOps culture within the larger Technology team, mentoring engineers, and will help guide Development teams adhere to best practice and evolving industry standards. You will lead by example, ensuring that the rest of the Technology team is working with the same vision. 

What are some of the roles and responsibilities of this role?

• Build and prototype infrastructure patterns and processes into working proofs of concept, then finalised solutions.
• Teach and mentor DevOps to other engineers within the Technology team.
• Help us to improve our systems by researching best practice approaches, then teaching these to the engineering teams, enabling them to implement these in their daily workflow.
• Maintain and extend our multi-environment build pipelines, mostly using Jenkins.
• Share upgrades and developments to our systems with the engineering teams via documentation and regular ‘tech demos’ or other ad hoc presentations.
• Document and explain best practices to the broader Technology team.
• Help to debug issues at the system level, by tracing logs across our various services, using Kibana and Datadog.

What would the ideal candidate be great at?

• Technical competence; solid experience working with Amazon Web Services, Terraform, Jenkins and databases (we use PostgreSQL). A working understanding of coding and solving problems with the ability to learn new paradigms quickly.
• Excellent critical judgement; able to make good decisions, be trusted, respected and dependable, be proactive and responsive, ask the right questions, raise flags at the right time, able to prioritise and plan workloads for the team.
• Technical leadership and team spirit; we are all contributing to the same platform, so be a great individual contributor and motivate the team through leading to achieve our collective goals – we only win if the team wins – see the impact of your own work and positively influence and help the work of others.
• Get stuck in, execute, generate ideas, have an impact, don’t just sit back and be a passenger.
• Being level-headed; keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs.
• Be a strong, balanced and flexible team player in an Agile context.
• Ability to influence and mentor Development teams and foster a DevOps culture from the ground up.
• Excellent communication skills and a strong team working ethic.
• Proven ability to automate provisioning and maintenance of infrastructure in a cloud environment.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving ability.
• Some scripting experience would be nice - with Python, Golang or Ruby.
• Solid understanding of data integrity, security and continuity of business.

Qualifications and experience

• BSc in Computer Science or equivalent.
• 2+ years’ experience as a DevOps Engineer.
• Deep and broad experience with Amazon Web Services. Extensive work experience with container orchestration in high volume, distributed systems.
• Working knowledge in at least one object oriented and one scripting language.
• Experience with monitoring, logging and alerting solutions - the more the better.
• Deep understanding of IPv4 networking, web protocols and Linux/Unix systems.
• Enjoys optimising systems by investigating and diving deep (beyond speeding up build times).
• Experience with JIRA or another issue tracking product.
• Experience with online version control services such as Github or Bitbucket.
• Experience with configuration management tools such as Chef, Puppet, Salt, or Ansible in production environments.