The Company

Stears is a fast-growing, digital information startup dedicated to solving the information & data gap in Africa. We are a team of people working together across multiple products and services to set the new standard for information on the continent.

This DevOps Engineer role is focused on Stears Insights (SI) while contributing towards laying the foundations for Stears Analytics. We are looking for an engineer who loves to learn and be challenged, and enjoys working in a high performing team where she is supported, given responsibility, and held to high standards. We’ve seen first-hand the impact of diversity of background amongst engineers, gender diversity in particular. Hence we are strongly encouraging qualified women to apply for this role!

The Role

Why it’s important: Nigerians all over the world are trying to understand their country in relation to their world better and Stears enables them to do so. To meet our growth and expansion goals, we’ve built and deployed applications at scale with multiple approaches across various tools and cloud providers. You will take ownership for how we ship our applications as well as how we secure them: automating deployments, monitoring and upgrading our cloud & infrastructure and services so we can provide the highest quality service to our customers. You’ll also be responsible for ensuring the safety and cyber-security of the entire company

What it covers: As a DevOps Engineer at Stears, you are responsible for:

• Cloud identity and access management
• Monitoring, alerting and log aggregation of our applications in production
• Keeping our cloud systems up to date and upgraded to avoid known vulnerabilities
• Infrastructure & deployment automation
• Platform reliability ownership
• Optimising cloud usage with billing alerts and intelligent choice of services
• Managing our security and secret access keys

Who you will work with: This role is part of the Stears team. As the DevOps Engineer, you will also be a member of the Delivery team (product, design & engineering) and report to the Engineering Manager. In addition to working with the core team of product manager, engineers, and designers, you will work with many internal stakeholders, including CTO, Customer Success, Marketing, and Analytics.

We are looking for someone with:

• Experience with Kubernetes & Helm
• Experience deploying to popular cloud providers - GCP, AWS etc.
• Experience with log aggregation and metrics monitoring tools - e.g. PLG / ELK stack (we use PLG)
• Experience with the linux/unix operating system and shell scripting
• Experience with Gitlab & Git-based deployment workflows
• Interest in or experience with infrastructure automation tools - e.g. Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation
• Interest in or experience with database management and administration
• Interest in or experience with FaaS or serverless deployments
  

Responsibilities

• Get platform in shape
  
  • Set up better monitoring and alerting tools including better monitoring of service uptime
  • Set up incident response protocols, documentation, training and manage them
  • Set up basic automated access control management on GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, etc.
  • Propose and improve management of development and deployment secrets
  • Pay down current DevOps technical debt (including moving from Vercel to Kubernetes on FE, and auto scaling celery workers)
  • Set up maintenance plan for cloud services (kubernetes, CloudSQL)
  • Infrastructure provisioning improvements including moving to infrastructure as code for deployment
    

• Make our current deployments more flexible
  
  • Auto-scaling improvements
  • Move Airbyte to Helm from Kustomize
  • Refactor Helm chart code and improve documentation
  • Create deployment documentation for easy scaling of pods and nodes

• Get our cloud billing under control
  
  • Automate and maintain our cloud deployments using infrastructure as code
  • Automate the provisioning of environments and matching build pipelines

Perks

• Remote working
• Help lay the platform foundations of our African expansion. We are currently fleshing out our expansion strategy and would love you to be a part of this growth while doing impactful work
• Be part of our new product offerings
  
• The Stears Experience - These are the top reasons engineers report having the best experience of their careers at Stears:
  • Experience personal growth on your way to engineering mastery through tough challenges and rewarding experiences
  • Gain a high level of autonomy and responsibility by taking on a senior role in our high trust startup environment and relatively flat organizational hierarchy
  • Do something meaningful by being part of a team making African data more widely available

As an engineer in the team, you can also expect:

• An emphasis on training and upskilling to be better every day
• Competitive salary across different engineering bands
• Remote friendly environment with flexible work hours
• Comprehensive health insurance
• Paid time off including vacation & sick days
• Regular access to the minds in the Stears Business newsroom and Stears Data analyses
  

Diversity

Stears is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and will consider all qualified applicants regardless of color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or family status, disability, gender identity or expression, veteran status, actual or presumed belonging to an ethnic group, or any other legally protected status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.