Junior Platform Engineer

Welcome in the world of Solar Energy!

At Solar monkey we love making an impact by accelerating the transition to solar energy. We do this by giving solar installers super powers with our innovative software. This allows them to work much more effectively and install even more solar installations. With our software installers can easily design, sell and maintain solar power systems remotely. We are active in 3 countries and are about to expand our horizon internationally. We have seen the Dutch market grow x5 within 5 years and are ready to see the same impact in the rest of Europe!

As a Junior Platform Engineer you will be part of the Platform team that is responsible for improving and maintaining our (cloud) infrastructure and providing the development teams with tools and advice on how to deploy their services, and how to keep sight on its metrics.

You can see in the description of our stack here (https://engineering.solarmonkey.nl/jobs/), we run a moderate cloud stack on the Google Cloud Platform and use Hashicorp’s tools for deployment. In our case a Consul + Vault cluster, and Nomad to schedule (container) jobs. That has proven to be a stable environment without too much maintenance. Most of the work is in improving the experience of other developers, and making it easier for them to take ownership over their domain, including the operations side.

What you will be doing

• Create well-tested, -debugged and -documented configurations and software for stories from the backlog, taking into account our best practices.

• Advance your knowledge of the technologies in our tech stack.

• Proactively improve the infrastructure and related code as a whole by proposing and executing on better practices.

• Make sure knowledge is shared in the development team by actively engaging in pull request reviews and pair programming.

• Actively engage with others to continuously strive to improve processes, create efficiencies and reduce costs and bottlenecks.

• Contribute in coordinating support and feature requests by interacting with stakeholders and documenting them.

• Clearly communicate problems and results with the rest of the team and company.

• Take responsibility for and become proficient in the tasks we share with the team like the concierge and release master role.

How do we work together?

Our main work is based on our backlog and roadmap, which the Platform Team decides on together with the CTO. Often, you will pair program with a fellow platform team member, or someone from product development. We also recently started practising Test-Driven Development. For our main app, we have a weekly release process using our own CI implementation, but we would like to start moving towards Continuous Deployment. We do have on-call duty only for office hours which is shared between all engineers from both Product and Platform teams. We have a clearly defined framework to help you grow as an engineer.

Compensation

The envisioned salary range for this position is €30k - €50k per year (excluding 8% holiday pay), depending on experience. Besides that we offer Stock Appreciation Rights and a 4% learning budget. You’ll get an Apple MacBook Pro to work on.

What's in it for you.

• Stock Appreciation Rights 

• 25 holidays excluding the national bank holidays

• Available budget for personal development at 4% of gross salary

• A Macbook

• The opportunity to work hybrid, with a budget to set up your home office

• Monthly social events and quarterly strategy days (company wide events also for remote workers). Enough opportunity to have fun with your colleagues ;)

What makes working at Solar Monkey a unique experience?

It's very simple! We believe that work should be fun. A happy and satisfied team is our number one priority. Our culture can be characterised as informal, no-nonsense and pleasantly warm. Our working environment is dynamic, has a clear structure and short communication lines. We are a close-knit team, where everyone works together with mutual respect. Thinking along and showing initiative is strongly encouraged in everybody, because we do it together! We like to have a lot of fun together, not just during our strategy days or events, but also on regular working days. Working in a team is just as natural for us as generating solar energy.

At Solar Monkey, we embrace diversity and foster an inclusive environment where team members of various backgrounds, ages, genders, and orientations are equally valued. Our dedication lies in developing a fair hiring process that ensures equal opportunities for all.

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for someone who likes to learn how to make development teams succeed by creating stability and efficiency in their cloud environment. Someone who is not afraid of the shell to debug weird network issues, but who hates snowflakes. Someone who likes developing tools that are used by others, and makes their lives easier. Someone who wants to learn to master our cloud.

Required skills

• You have worked on a cloud platform (GCP/AWS/OpenStack) and are familiar with Infrastructure as Code.

• You are able to write in Python (or another server-side language like Go or Ruby, and willing to learn Python).

• You are familiar with container based deployment.

• You are able to work with a diverse group of people. You’re not a rock star or code-ninja, you’re a human, of some form 🙂.

• You can clearly outline your thoughts about a technical solution in written form (and diagrams are always a bonus!)

• You actively engage with others to learn and remove blockers.

• You are able to pick up new things quickly.

• You want to work 32 to 40 hours a week.

• You are not looking for a 9 to 5 job and are willing to sometimes work outside of office hours.

Wishlist

• You have experience with Hashicorp’s Consul, Vault & Nomad, Google Cloud Run and/or Kubernetes.

• You have experience with Terraform.