Our team as well as our software landscape is growing, so it’s time for us to start looking for someone focusing on infrastructure. In this post we want to share a bit our reasoning behind this.
Where we’re coming from
Right now, taking care of our infrastructure (managing our Kubernetes cluster, improving our Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipeline, looking at other components like databases) is something that we share among all of our developers.
Some people out there might call this “DevOps” but this term is pretty much burned throughout the industry. For some it’s simply a new name for “Ops” while for others it’s the solution to every problem out there and will ultimately bring balance to the Force. So let’s quickly forget we ever used it.
We’re also growing our team quite fast which in turn means that the amount of software that we can produce grows quite fast as well. We therefore need to put more focus on issues like standardization and tooling support.
Continuing with our current way “everyone takes care of everything” has its drawbacks. Some people simply don’t like tackling infrastructure topics, while others would love to spend more time but are already planned for other projects.
But infrastructure is an important foundation. Without a healthy environment in which to actually run software the software itself becomes useless.
Where we’re heading
Looking at our current needs and the growth we see for our future, we have decided to start looking for an infrastructure engineer.
But what do we mean by infrastructure engineer? Isn’t that just a fancy new name for a system administrator? No, we don’t think it is.
Infrastructure these days is a lot more than managing a fleet of servers on which “the developers” can run their applications.
An infrastructure engineer at BetterDoc needs to fully understand and embrace our technical vision. In order to provide a powerful CI/CD pipeline, it is essential to understand what the pipeline is being used for and what is actually built on the pipeline.
An infrastructure engineer at BetterDoc also needs to actively take part in the development process. Some applications and some services are still applications but they are essential parts of the infrastructure. Take an authentication service as an example: It’s one of the corner stones of ensuring our overall data access concept used by all our other services. It is software, but it also is infrastructure.
Maybe it’s you?
We don’t have a fully fledged job description yet - and maybe we never will. We’re constantly adapting and improving and we’re looking for someone to join us in that journey. Someone who is eager to not only do what is listed in a document but to do what is useful for our team in becoming better.
If you have the feeling that this person could be you then get in contact with us at pirates@betterdoc.org. We’re eager to get into a discussion.