Staff Infrastructure Engineer
About Us
Northbeam is building the world’s most advanced marketing intelligence platform for growth. Our attribution modeling technology and customizable dashboards provide our customers with a unified view of their e-commerce business data. The smartest brands in ecommerce trust Northbeam to accurately attribute their advertising spend, understand the entire customer journey, and make data-driven decisions to grow profitably.
Northbeam’s team and customer base are growing quickly, and it’s essential that we invest in the right people & systems to scale our business. Our business has found incredible product-market fit and continues to grow rapidly. This is a career-defining opportunity for an experienced engineer to accelerate their growth and contribute to a rapidly-scaling company.
The Northbeam team is composed of hard-working and talented individuals focused on collaboration, personal growth, and technical excellence. We would love for you to join us!
Job Description
Northbeam is fundamentally a data product - the whole company. We don’t sell shoes, or ads, or games, or database technologies. We sell data: quality integrations with a variety of platforms, fresh and reliable data pulls, correct aggregations and algorithmic insights on top of that data, all packaged up in a user-facing application.
Our APIs, integrations, and data processing systems, are as critical to the company as the customer-facing web services and applications.
As an Infrastructure Engineer working at Northbeam, you will work with a small engineering team to create a scaleable, observable, reliable platform. Responsibilities will range widely and evolve, as they tend to at startups. The following all fall within the Infrastructure team’s remit:
- CI/CD and dev infrastructure
- Security
- DR policies
- SSL cert management and DNS
- Infrastructure as Code
- Capacity planning and budgeting
- Observability
- Scaling plans and automation
- Guidance for best use of cloud infrastructure
- … and more
Success in this role will require significant existing experience, interest in continuously learning and iterating on existing solutions, a penchant for automation over “clickops” and one-offs, and ability to effectively collaborate with engineers, auditors, product managers, and more.
About the Role
You’ll wear many hats, juggle diverse tasks, and probably find yourself learning new skills on the fly – while also teaching a few. If you thrive on variety and love diving in, you’ll fit right in. Here’s a taste of what might come up on any given week:
- Capacity modeling: Craft a proposal for managing capacity reservations that strikes the perfect balance between savings and flexibility. Bonus points if the CFO and VP of Engineering can tweak your parameters and run simulations themselves while you move on to other pressing tasks.
- Optimize the Cloud: Team up with engineering teams to evaluate and upgrade cloud server instances. Automate the upgrade rollout, deal with flapping alerts, improve roll-over automation, fix a few broken windows along the way.
- Solve observability puzzles: The eng team wants to move a service to a serverless backend, and pull you in to help figure out how alerts, logs, and deployments should work. Explore options, figure out pros, cons, and costs. Work with the team to discuss the alternatives, and roll out the winner.
- Automate All the Things: GCP loves its projects. So many projects. So you automate provisioning GCP projects needed to deal with their per-project limits and various data isolation requirements. Pre-configured services, networking rules, access grants, CI pipelines, the whole deal.
- Tame Noisy Alerts: Hunt down the root causes of noisy alerts and tweak configurations so we only hear from the system when it matters. “Just see if it goes away” is not an acceptable reaction to an alert. Not on your watch.
- Security Meets Sanity: Work with management to make secure development policies straightforward (read: something people will actually follow). Stay on top of patching, pen-testing, training, the whole shebang.
- Chasing Errors Across the Galaxy: Track down the cause of a 500 error across five codebases, two observability platforms, and three legacy servers that seem to exist solely to test your patience.
- Scale the Platform: Keep our infrastructure humming as we grow—enhance, maintain, and iterate to keep everything running smoothly.
- Write it Down: Create technical documentation that’s useful for engineers, understandable for stakeholders, and not soul-crushing to read.
You won’t do all of this alone - you could, but maybe not all of it at once, plus it’s good for others to know how this stuff works. But you will set the tone, and you will teach, collaborate, and lead by example.
You’ll be a key player in keeping our platform reliable, efficient, and scalable. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll tell stories of yore. If this sounds like your kind of chaos, we’d love to hear from you.
About You
Requirements
- Cloud Expertise: Solid hands-on experience with GCP (or another major cloud provider) and a knack for automating infrastructure. You should know your way around IAM, VPCs, and compute instances like it’s second nature.
- Scripting & Automation: Proficiency in scripting languages like Python and Bash. Extensive experience with IaC tools like Terraform. Basic familiarity with SQL.
- Observability Know-How: Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog).
- Networking: SSL Certs, API Gateways, Docker network shenanigans, network segmentation, NGINX configs, VPC Peering, load balancers, proxies… you’ve seen it all.
- Problem Solving: A track record of solving complex technical issues, and staying cool under pressure. Outages happen.
- Collaboration: Comfortable working cross-functionally with engineering, data, product, and management teams to design and implement solutions that make everyone’s life easier.
- Documentation Skills: You can write clear, concise technical documentation that other humans can actually follow.
Nice to Have
- Experience working in marketing, e-commerce, or ad-tech.
- An understanding of secure development practices and experience supporting audits or certifications (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001).
- Experience with infrastructure not deployed to a “cloud”.
- Experience with capacity planning and AWS/GCP cost optimization
- Understanding of database admin process and automation (user provisioning, backups, cloning and replication, index management, etc).
If you meet most of the “Requirements” and a sprinkle of the "Nice to Have," we’d love to hear from you!
Values
- Growth mindset - we’re always learning and growing
- Customer focus - we want to make the customer happy with our product
- Ownership mentality - we think like owners in the business
- Radical candor - we’re transparent and give direct feedback to one another
- Empathic disposition - we’re kind to one another and help each other grow
Benefits
- Equity package
- Generous base salary
- Healthcare Benefits (medical, dental, vision)
- Travel to meet with the team
- Flexible PTO Policy
- 12 Company Paid Holidays