DevOps Engineer

We are hiring remotely for this role in Europe

Help us simplify legal transactions

A large segment of the legal industry works on transactional legal processes. Building a wind farm, merging two companies or selling a skyscraper - lawyers help make these things happen and their work is surprisingly similar to planning and leading a technology project. There are documents to be produced, agreements to get signed, and a whole lot of detail to be understood, agreed and made clear. There’s an order in which things need doing and there are stages that need to be complete before you can move on. 

For example, how do you make sure that when you buy a building you’re getting all the land you think you’re getting? How do you make sure you don’t fund a wind farm and then find that there is no permission to build it or that the people you funded are scammers? How do you make sure there isn’t an ambiguous clause that’ll make it all go wrong? You get a lawyer to manage the transaction.

Since the dawn of Microsoft Word, this humble word processor has been the default way to manage these legal transactions.  We want to change this, by building a platform that allows transactions to be managed online, and in a collaborative way.  That means we’re on a mission to transform the $600bn market for legal services worldwide. 

Our customers include some of the world’s top law firms, such as Allen & Overy, Hogan Lovells, Herbert Smith Freehills, Shearman & Sterling and King & Wood Mallesons. And we’ve been used on transactions in more than 60 countries.

The Role

We are looking to hire a specialist DevOps engineer to join our team. The role is available at junior or mid level, dependent upon your skills and experience.

We see DevOps as a team-wide ethos and approach and something that involves all of our engineers - we aren’t aiming to build a classical infrastructure operations team with a different name. Our goal is to have a group of experts who are responsible for infrastructure setup and configuration, monitoring and visibility but who also develop and deploy tools, reusable frameworks and components for use in product development and to help us optimise our infrastructure and working practices.

We are working towards full Continuous Delivery, using feature flags and canary or blue/green deployments to allow frequent, small releases to our production environments. We need to further develop our logging and monitoring solution, including adding advanced features around security and distributed anomaly detection.

We build web-facing applications, running on Linux, deployed in AWS and working in Agile teams. We work in feature teams, focussed on particular product and system areas. We use GitLab for source control and CI/CD tooling and use Kubernetes, Kustomize, EKS, Terraform/Terragrunt and shell scripting to define and configure our environments. We use React, node.js and Python, with GraphQL between front- and backend.

What you will be doing

• Assist in designing and implementing, with our development teams, scalable, reliable infrastructure, deployment processes and tools
• Contribute to the automation and streamlining of deployment, testing, and release processes using appropriate tools, building on what we already have and extending with new capabilities where helpful
• Monitor and optimise system performance and availability, helping engineering teams to troubleshoot and resolve issues as they arise
• Develop and maintain documentation for infrastructure, deployment, and release processes
• Participate in on-call rotation to provide support for production systems
• Contribute to improving security posture and system reliability through continuous evaluation and recommendations
• Work with Security team in security assessments and implementing best practices
• Support Kubernetes clusters for container orchestration and deployment

Who would you be working with?

Steve Wheeler, CTO

Steve Howe, Devops Lead - who you will be reporting into, alongside a welcoming, inclusive and committed team.

Team culture is really important to us. We are looking for someone who is excited to join us as a key employee at this important stage in our growth and who will bring new and exciting perspectives to Legatics. We are a friendly and passionate bunch with a wide range of interests. We love to socialise together too, holding regular team events.

Requirements

What we need from you

• Experience as a DevOps Engineer or similar role, working with AWS
• Experienced Linux user - preferably Debian-based distros
• Proficiency in at least one scripting and one programming language, ideally including Bash scripting. Javascript or Python will be a plus
• Experience with automation and configuration management tools (e.g. Terraform, Ansible)
• Experience with containerization (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes) and building high-availability infrastructure using them
• Familiarity with source control and continuous integration and delivery tools (e.g. Gitlab, Jenkins)
• Familiarity with web-based systems and the core internet protocols, experience with TCP/IP networking
• Strong problem-solving and communication skills, in English
• Upper-intermediate level of English

Bonus points for the following (but don’t worry, these are NOT essential):

• Experience building and maintaining software and tools for use as-a-service by software development teams
• Experience with monitoring and logging tools (e.g. Datadog, Splunk)
• Experience with agile development methodologies (e.g. Scrum, Kanban)
• Have proficiency in troubleshooting network issues, TCP handshake process, web caching at different levels, routing and NAT/PAT work, DNS, email etc
• Experience with CDNs
• Experience with penetration tests, automated security test systems (Prowler, AWS Config etc)
• Familiarity with web-based systems and the core internet protocols

Benefits

What we offer you:

• 25 days holiday per year (plus public holidays).
• Early Finish Fridays - on the last Friday of every month, we finish at lunchtime
• Pension with NEST.
• Personal Learning & Development budget.
• Access to Mental healthcare for you and your immediate family.
• Enhanced parental leave policies so you can spend more time with your family.
• Lots of opportunities for accelerated professional development and career progression.
• Work alongside a supportive and talented team with the opportunity to grow one of the world’s leading LegalTech scale-ups.
• A warm, genuinely collaborative culture and an awesome team; and
• Regular socials.

Technology

We follow a microservices approach written in Node.js on AWS, managed using Terraform, Kustomize and Kubernetes. GraphQL and Apollo are used between front and backend. Our frontend is an SPA built with React and Redux, with some Ramda. We have a dedicated test / QA team, doing a combination of manual and automated testing.

We work according to DevOps principles and we’re working towards full CI/CD, aiming for frequent small releases supported by feature flags, distributed config management, monitoring & tracing, etc.

Power in diversity

We put users at the heart of our design to provide legal transaction experiences that everyone loves. In order to make that a reality, we seek to foster a diverse and inclusive working environment that can empower our people to be creative, effective and innovative, to build a brand we are proud of.

We don’t discriminate against gender, race, religion or belief, disability, age, marital status or sexual orientation. Whatever your background may be, we welcome anyone with talent, drive and emotional intelligence. We're committed to building a diverse team and are constantly looking for ways to improve our processes to help us do that.