Director of Technical Operations

What is Sylvera anyway? ‍👩‍👨🌳

Sylvera provides carbon data for genuine climate impact. Our mission is to incentivize investment in real climate action. 

Purchasing credits through the carbon markets is one of the most established and scalable ways to channel finance from the private sector to effective climate solutions and work toward societal net zero. Unfortunately, the voluntary carbon markets have been plagued with mistrust and a lack of effectiveness since they’ve emerged – until Sylvera. 

To help organizations ensure they're making the most effective investments, Sylvera builds software that independently and accurately automates the evaluation of carbon projects that capture, remove, or avoid emissions. With Sylvera's data and tools, businesses and governments can confidently invest in, benchmark, deliver, and report real climate impact. 

Our team is made up of leading minds in climate change from scientists to policy, finance and carbon market experts. We work in partnership with scientific organisations, universities, governments and think tanks to develop and test rigorous and holistic ratings methodologies, leveraging the latest technology. Founded in 2020, Sylvera has 150+ employees across the world with offices in London, New York, Belgrade and Singapore. We’ve raised over $96million from leading VCs like Balderton Capital, Index Ventures and Insight Partners to date. 

What will I be doing? ‍‍👩‍💻👨‍💻

We’re looking for a mission-driven Director of Technical Operations to join our Tech function, reporting directly to our CTO. You will play a vital role in shaping our IT / Infosec organisation and practices, as well as ensuring we are delivering best-in-class infrastructure in the cloud and on-premises for our engineering, ML and science teams.

Specific responsibilities will include:

- Leading our awesome Site Reliability and Developer Experience team of 3 engineers

- Building our IT function from scratch to deliver a compelling experience to all Sylverans, including vendor evaluation and negotiation, outsourcing, etc.

- Scaling up our DevOps/SRE processes, leading on initiatives like on-call, and incident management. 

- Strengthening our InfoSec strategy - considering trade-offs between different compliance approaches to identify the best path for Sylvera and implementing it

- Assessing the effectiveness of our  on-prem infrastructure and associated developer experience with a view to unlock its full potential while remaining cost-effective

- Contributing hands on to the design and development of our  cloud infrastructure and monitoring of our performance metrics

- Raising the bar in terms of infrastructure change management and integrity, developing processes for testing infrastructure changes in partnership with the engineering team

- Assisting and unblocking the engineering team with infrastructure problems

- Owning the delivery of tasks and epics and refining our Agile ways of working

We’re looking for someone who: 🧠💚

- Has significant experience with Terraform within an AWS infrastructure environment (ECS/EKS/K8s) with a desire to drive further sophistication of the infrastructure in question 

- Has experience with monitoring solutions - e.g. Cloudwatch,  Datadog, Zabbix, Prometheus

- Has experience with high availability and scalable solutions

- Possesses knowledge about AWS/Cloud/Security to drive best practices

- Has significant experience in making trade-off decisions to create InfoSec strategies

- Has experience having owned and driven improvements of DevOps/SRE processes (i.e., on-call, incident management)

- Has a track record bootstrapping an IT function in a startup environment, making the right calls to lay down a strong foundation for future growth 

- Is a “doer” who is comfortable taking ownership of deliverables when needed

- Enjoys partnering with the wider engineering function and is able to communicate technical considerations with extreme clarity

- Cares deeply about the climate and ecosystems of the earthIs a self-starter who thrives in constantly evolving environments, with startup experience

We’d like someone highly ambitious, motivated and eager to propel their career forward. We prioritise grit, positivity, and the willingness to get stuck in, and encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't exactly match this job description

Benefits 💰

- Equity in a rapidly growing startup

- Private Health Insurance and Life Assurance 

- Unlimited annual leave - and encouragement to actually use it!

- Enhanced parental leave 

- Up to 20 days paid sick leave 

- £500 WFH allowance 

- No corners cut in having the best tech to do your job

- Access to Mental Health support via Spill

- Monthly team socials

Location 🌍 

UK (with access to an office in London if you wanted to come in) 

Our Values 🙌

Own it: We believe in giving people the autonomy to own their impact.

Stay curious: Our business is built on transparency and debunking misperceptions.

Do what’s right - even when it’s hard: The right path isn’t always easy or obvious.

Collaborate with kindness: Great teams are built on open communication and respect.

What if you’re a partial fit? 🌱

We prioritise grit, positivity, and the willingness to get stuck in, and encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't exactly match this job description. 

Equal employment opportunity 🌈

Sylvera is an equal opportunity employer: we value diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.