DevOps Engineer

Pawprint is an employee-engagement app for climate action. Our main focus is behavioural change, and we’ll rest at nothing to achieve it – hey, it’s the future of the human race we’re fighting for, anything goes!

We’re also dedicated to involving the businesses we work with. After all, only when governments, businesses and individuals work together will we see the level of change needed to solve the climate emergency. Currently, we deliver data back to businesses to help them make informed decisions about the direction of their sustainable travel. We have big plans to do even more in this space.

In terms of what it’s like to work at Pawprint, we’re a certified B Corp, Living Wage Employer, and 1% for the Planet member. We strive to walk the walk and act as a shining example for all stakeholders.

A note on diversity: to beat climate change, diversity of thought and experience is essential. Pawprint is dedicated to hiring great people from a wide variety of backgrounds – if you feel your experience (life or work) has something to add, please let us know in your cover letter!

About DevOps at Pawprint

Pawprint is a platform consisting of a number of pieces of software. We’ve evolved our codebase over the years and like any startup we’re ambitious about trying new things but realistic about the need to maintain the value we’ve already created.

Our software consists of a number of key areas: our backend core, an employee hybrid webapp on Web, iOS, and Android, and a customer browser-based Dashboard webapp. These pieces of software work together to form our overall platform, providing data to analytics services and our data science tools.

We have a tech team consisting of backend engineers, data sci and frontend engineers, and devops is seen as a fundamental element to optimising our development workflows and delivering value to customers quickly. You’re part of the team and we see you as essential to us delivering great software.

We leverage Gitlab for much of our code and pipeline orchestration, using Gitlab CI. We run Docker Compose, Ansible, with an increasing amount of Python in our devops and data stack.

Our database is Postgres, our API runs on PHP and all of our software runs on AWS, utilising native services where possible.

We host a significant amount of data which is sensitive to individuals and organisations and the role requires a good understanding of data security and policies that corporate customers often require.

Requirements

Key Responsibilities:

• Maintain the Pawprint production & development stack and ensure it is fit for purpose for achieving our outcomes
• Proactively look to simplify and improve our development stack and processes to maximise efficiency of delivering value to customers
• Troubleshoot issues with the team when they arise and ensure that the pipelines are capable of delivering deployments
• Enable the development team to develop, test, and deploy through to production without assistance
• Develop new software to solve outcomes, assisting the wider development team by either providing tooling or software where needed to help solve the outcomes
• Ensure security policies are followed and proactively address security risks across our whole stack
• Respond to outages, security alerts and customer alerts and respond in a professional manner to any issues
• “Automate yourself” - as a startup we always look to to reduce our reliance on any single role and make it easier for everyone to work unaided

Key competencies and personal attributes:

• Strong experience with AWS, running all the systems required for keeping lights on and adding systems when needed
• Strong experience with Docker, especially Docker Compose
• Strong knowledge of Ansible
• Strong knowledge of Gitlab CI
• Good knowledge of Python for DevOps
• Experience working with PHP stacks highly desirable
• Working knowledge of iOS/Android deployment systems such as Fastlane
• Experience in simplifying stacks into cloud-native such as Fargate, allowing us to reduce costs overall in the ops area
• Knowledge of security standards and challenges, especially with handling personal data
• Some experience working with Postgres is desirable
• Experience working with other vendors such as Microsoft technologies (Active Directory, Azure) desirable for future integration needs

Benefits

Whether it’s a basic benefit, or something out-of-the-box, we have taken care to curate a list of benefits which both sweetens ‘The Pawprint Deal’, and aligns with our ‘Business as a force for good’ ethos.

• £50,000-£70,000 depending on your level of experience
• Part time considered (4 days a week)
• 32 days baseline holiday, inclusive of bank holidays, plus a day off on your birthday or the nearest working day. You’re not obliged to take them on the prescribed day, but you are obliged to use your holiday. Burnout isn’t cool.
• 2 slow travel days – days off to incentivise low-carbon travel to a holiday destination. This doesn’t include journeys within England, Scotland and Wales.
• A sabbatical after each 5 years of service – this is a fully-paid, 4-week sabbatical (on top of your allotted annual leave) to be used as you see fit.

• Work where you want – we’re really flexible about where you work. You can mix and match between working from our office in Edinburgh and WFH, or you can be fully remote. There’s even scope to work from abroad for short periods (within tax limits). You must have the right to work in the UK.
• Flexible hours – we operate a core hours policy of 10:00-12:00 and 14:00-16:00, Monday through Friday. Outside of this, the day is yours to get work done when you feel most productive.

• Options scheme – we currently offer exit-only share options to permanent employees.
• Home office budget – £200 towards making your home office setup comfortable.
• Company-wide DPA (bonus pot) – if OKR targets are hit, there’s money set aside to be split between all permanent Pawprint employees.
• Cost of inflation annual review – every year, your salary will be reviewed (at least) in line with inflation, except in exceptional circumstances. E.g. if matching inflation across salaries would bankrupt the company.
• Access to Eco Perks – this is an in-app Pawprint feature. It gets you discounts and offers on carefully-vetted eco products like Ripple wind farm shares.
• Access to unlimited monthly coaching sessions via More Happi
• Team events/bonding – we like to keep this pretty flexible, but at a minimum you can look forward to an annual end-of-year celebration.
• Work on something with purpose – perhaps the biggest benefit of working for Pawprint is that you’ll spend your day solving issues that really matter.

Decision Making:

As DevOps Engineer, you will have authority over how we approach DevOps software day to day within Pawprint. Major changes to the DevOps approach, or decisions with the potential to impact the company’s reputation must be discussed with the CPO, who will raise the issue with the relevant members of the leadership team if necessary.

Other Information:

The role can be hybrid (we have an Edinburgh office you are welcome to use) or fully remote - we want the best people, as long as you have a UK working visa. Home working is actively supported.

The position will report directly to the Chief Product Officer.

Social and Environmental Responsibilities:

Pawprint is keen to ensure that all employees are socially and environmentally responsible and that management decisions are considerate of these responsibilities at all times. There needs to be a balance between the economy and the ecosystem, hence we make all decisions based on their impact in the following areas:

• Environmental - all efforts are made to undertake business in an environmentally friendly manner. For example, we have a no flight policy for domestic travel and employees have the freedom to work flexibly where possible
• Philanthropic - we will actively support our nominated charities through financial donations each month and support employees in using charitable days to volunteer for causes personal to them
• Economic - we will strive to build a strong business financially with the aim to invest further in developments that allow us to extend our reach and drive further carbon reduction globally
• Ethical - we will always consider the ethics of our business partners and suppliers, to ensure we support fair trade and fair working practices and any investments we make will be environmentally conscious

To ensure we achieve this as an organisation we will use these four areas as a checklist for all business decisions we undertake, and will share them internally with all staff so they can be fully aware of our process and policy.