Are you a software engineer with a passion for site reliability, who wants to help us connect the world with great graphic design? Do you appreciate the value of highly available, well monitored services? If you answered yes, great. Read on to learn more about who we are, what we need, and what we can offer you.

About 99designs

99designs is the world’s global creative platform that makes it easier for customers and designers to work together to create designs they love. Our mission is to champion creativity to create opportunities for people around the world. Founded in 2008, 99designs has grown from a small, online forum into a worldwide community of talented designers that is now the go-to solution for businesses, agencies, and individuals.

About working with us

We’re a global team with a philosophy of encouraging passionate people to be fun and creative. With a presence in Melbourne, Oakland and Berlin we benefit from bringing together the experiences and viewpoints of a wide range of talented people from around the world. We believe a diverse workplace is a healthy workplace.

We have a fleet of services, written in several languages, running mostly on AWS Elastic Container Service. We take site reliability seriously, with all members of delivery teams on call supporting what they ship. We constantly refine our processes and tools with the aim to make developers happy, efficient and able to focus on building great products. We love shipping, continuous delivery is in our DNA; anyone on the team can deploy to production, and we do so many times a day. We also have a number of open source projects which we proudly develop and maintain.

99designs employees enjoy many benefits including:

• Flexible working hours and the opportunity to work from home when you need to

• Continual training and learning, conference attendance, in-house mentoring and fortnightly R&D days

• Health and wellness programs like yoga, a running club and quiet spaces when in the office, and free access to wellbeing coaches online

• In the office we enjoy a fully stocked kitchen, with enough food to make delicious breakfast and lunch every day, including an industrial-strength coffee machine, free snacks, and weekly delivered lunches

• An active social club, with events for you and your family - when lockdown restrictions allow us to!

• Paid parental leave

• Top-of-the-line Mac gear

About the role

Site Reliability Engineer is an important role in the engineering team at 99designs. It is a senior individual contributor position that leads through influence and advocacy and collaborates effectively with delivery teams and stakeholders from the wider organization. 

On a day to day basis, you will:

• Provide support and training to the wider engineering team in your area of expertise.

• Embed yourself in delivery engineering teams to advance and accelerate major initiatives, splitting your time between delivering product value and making broader Site Reliability contributions.

• Identify areas for improvement across the organisation and drive Engineering-wide technical change in the field of Site Reliability.

• Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation, and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and team velocity.

• Lead development and roll out of new tools, technologies and processes that have high business impact and are used by multiple teams.

• Introduce best practices into the teams around observability, SLOs and reliability.

• Analyse and improve application performance and reliability and take part in our on-call operations roster; "You build it, you run it".

About you

We’re committed to creating a diverse and inclusive culture that welcomes, supports and celebrates people from all experiences and backgrounds. We know through experience that having a range of perspectives and ideas builds a stronger and more creative work environment.

Essential requirements

• Minimum 5 years commercial experience with a language like Go, JavaScript, PHP or Ruby.

• Experience operating large scale web services.

• Proficiency with shell scripting and building developer tooling.

• Experience operating and observing distributed, highly available systems.

• Proficiency with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

• A positive mindset: equal parts curious, collaborative, and can-do.

• Strong verbal and written communication skills.

• An eagerness to learn new languages, frameworks, and tools.

Preferred requirements

• Commercial experience working in an SRE or dev-ops role.

• Experience with AWS, Docker, and infrastructure as code.

• Experience with TypeScript, GraphQL, and Apollo.

• Experience in an "agile" environment, especially in iterative/continuous delivery.

• A love of open-source, keeping things simple and building on the shoulders of giants.