Principal Engineer, Software Operations @ Bolt Threads

At Bolt Threads, we believe that answers to our most vexing problems can be found in nature. Every day we’re inspired by the amazing materials we work with, and driven by the desire to turn these materials into incredible products. We are a venture backed, idea driven company, led by world-class scientific and engineering talent, as well as experienced executives from the technology and apparel industries.

PRINCIPAL ENGINEER, SOFTWARE OPERATIONS

Bolt Threads is looking for a Principal Engineer, Software Operations with experience in distributed systems. This could be the ground floor Site Reliability Engineering opportunity of your dreams. You will be responsible for determining, building and driving our operations systems and practices as we build out a full material to retail distributed operating platform leveraging modern development and operations architectures and operations and focusing on the collection and analysis of a variety of data from widely disparate systems.

In partnership with our Director of Software Engineering, you will be responsible for driving a DevOps culture and supporting that culture with your work. We won’t ask you to man a pager 24/7, but we will ask you to do it sometimes and to support the entire engineering team doing that as well. We will ask you to define and implement tools and practices to continually reduce the number of late night calls, and ensure everyone is as productive as they can be when they’re on them and in the post-mortem. This is all about treating operations as a software problem.

You will be responsible for our ability to maintain the health and well-being of systems that are strategically essential to Bolt’s mission to reinvent modern apparel retail. As such, you will be expected to take part in architecture and design of systems that include front-end retail all the way back to our laboratory information management systems (LIMS). As a successful candidate, you will have experience in running consumer-facing services to scale in a modern public cloud. You will have a detailed understanding of virtual machine and container technology as well as experience with high availability services and data architectures. We are looking seriously at deploying CQRS and Event Sourcing based architectures and so experience with those and event-based durable queuing systems is a significant plus. This is a rare opportunity to start with an essentially clean slate and build something of significant substance. If you are passionate about modern distributed systems, have experience in building and operating those systems while developing a modern operations culture, want to make a large impact in a large market, and can thrive in an environment of committed and passionate peers, this may be your dream job.

THE POSITION 

• Lead an operations practice heavy on automation and embracing a modern Developer engaged operations culture.
• Build out infrastructure for provisioning, configuration management, deployment, unit and integration testing, monitoring and centralized logging of complex distributed systems.
• Partner with product management, define and develop operational KPIs for the products and overall organization to drive measureable success.
• Engage senior architects, development and product management to align goals, plans and develop broader architecture for company systems.
• Partner with IT director to determine internal operational needs and projects and align overall systems architecture.
• Engage senior architects and IT to continuously improve production cloud-based operations practices.
• Develop architecture and operational practice for data analysis for both systems and commercial data.
• Manage cloud service provider budgeting and overall spend.

REQUIREMENTS

• At least 4 years of experience modern cloud based operations.
• At least 3 years experience with operating distributed systems.
• Lead an operations team that shipped a distributed systems product in one or more of Scala, Closure, Erlang, Go, Ruby, or Java.
• Production experience with modern data pipelines particularly streaming systems (Spark, Flink, Kafka) a strong plus.
• At least 4 years experience with AWS or other major cloud services vendor.
• Plus if you’ve run e-commerce infrastructure for a large retailer.
• Demonstrable experience in presenting complex ideas to senior management and a broad technical and scientific audience.