Director of Engineering (Operations/Infrastructure/SRE)

Every minute, people watch four days of video on Wistia.
Last year, we transitioned infrastructure and SRE duties from a shared responsibility of all engineers to a dedicated team. That team's first task was to establish norms and best practices in the development, deployment, and monitoring of our services.

This investment is already paying dividends, and we'd like to expand this team's responsibilities to include site reliability, monitoring and alerting, and architecture reviews for shared services.

We're looking for someone with deep experience in infrastructure and site reliability, who can lead and grow this team to make it happen!

Specific responsibilities of this role include:

• Oversight of our infrastructure platform (built on Kubernetes), our internal video service (which handles all uploads, storage, transcoding, and delivery of video), our video analytics data pipeline, and our in-house product metrics warehouse.
• Automating manual processes to make them more reliable and less toilsome.
• Defining service level objectives that keep customers happy while allowing developers to swing for the fences.
• Directing local and remote SREs.
• Contributing to architectural decisions that underpin the larger Wistia platform.
• Finding clever ways to do big things without spending big money.
• Translating business needs into an infrastructure roadmap.

Here are some qualities we look for in all Wistia engineering positions, and why we feel they're so important:

• You are curious and enjoy learning. We’re constantly faced with the unknown at Wistia. How do we create an analytics tracking system for 360 video? How do we scale the data store for it? What does it mean for that system to be reliable, and how can we measure and achieve that?
• You are a collaborator. Whether through pair programming, a whiteboard session, or a casual lunch conversation, collaboration helps the best ideas and practices to proliferate.
• You have strong communication skills. Each of us has only part of the overall picture in our head at a given time. Explaining ideas at an understandable level of abstraction is critical to achieving a shared vision.
• You're empathetic and emotionally intelligent. Sometimes things don't go smoothly. A customer gets frustrated, or a coworker does something that bothers you. Understanding where others are coming from, and being in control of and deliberate about how you respond to them, empowers you to solve problems while also being supportive of and sensitive to those around you.
• You know your fundamentals. Fads and frameworks come and go. We’re less worried that you know the Next Hot Thing™ than that you feel comfortable with the underlying data structures, algorithms, languages, and protocols that make web applications work.
• You are comfortable thinking in trade offs. Some decisions will always have a downside. Do we want our distributed database to be more consistent, or more available? Should we use a hosted product that will save us time now, but force us to move to a new system in a year? These are regular conversations!
• You think for yourself and you're willing to speak up. We hire people because we value their thoughts, insights and experiences. These things matter a great deal more to us than conventional wisdom or herd mentalities in technical communities -- always think for yourself and don't hold back!
• You value simplicity. Blaise Pascal once wrote, "I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one." Making things simple and elegant is deceptively difficult, but it’s worth the effort because the result is easier to understand and work with.

If this role sounds fun and rewarding to you, and you share the values we're looking for, we hope you'll apply below!