DevOps Engineer

We're looking for a great DevOps Engineer who can make a huge contribution to our engineering team as we design and build our world-class product for modern charities.

At Beacon we’re a growing technology startup building the best nonprofit-focused CRM in the world. We passionately believe in the power of technology to make a difference.

Chris and David, both software engineers, founded Beacon in 2017 to build a new kind of charity CRM using the latest technology and design principles.

Now hundreds of innovative charities around the world trust Beacon to run their core technology infrastructure. Animal welfare, human rights, disaster relief, cancer support - all powered by Beacon. You can see a quick demo of our product, here.

We have doing good at the core of our mission, but we're also profitable, privately owned, and our goals are for long term sustainable growth - not making a quick buck for venture capitalists.

At Beacon we take building exceptional software very seriously. In a recent survey by Fundraising magazine we were rated 4.9/5 on functionality and 5/5 on ease of use - we want to keep it that way!

We're a team of 10 full-stack in-house engineers who are entirely responsible for the development and maintenance of the Beacon product.

Our technology stack is built around JavaScript running on AWS. The front-end web app is built with React, making extensive use of Material UI. Beacon's back-end infrastructure is in Node.js, based around microservices running on AWS Lambda. All new endpoints are written using GraphQL, and we're big advocates. Our database infrastructure is a combination of Postgres and Google BigQuery. We're on a journey to introduce more TypeScript into our stack wherever appropriate! 

Responsibilities

Your focus will be on improving and maintaining Beacon's infrastructure and developer operations. You'll work directly with the Head of Engineering and our existing engineering team to operationally support the design, development, and maintenance of a sophisticated and modern web application.

You will:

• Take general responsibility for developer operations, building and maintaining a brilliant set of tools and processes for the engineering team
• Work closely with the CTO to enforce security policies and processes to the standards required for ISO27001
• Improve the efficiency of our release process so we can continue to deliver robust code at blazing fast speed as we scale
• Configuration of AWS infrastructure monitoring, including alerts, performance dashboards and logs. Contribute to the team’s strategy for responding to alarms when things go wrong.
• Take responsibility for administration of AWS roles and permissions
• Drive the adoption of IAC across Beacon’s infrastructure
• Take responsibility for configuration management of developer machines
• Take responsibility for development and maintenance of Beacon’s, Development, Staging, and Production environments. Support engineers in maintaining their local developer environments.
• Work with the Head of Engineering to manage Beacon’s infrastructure budget

Requirements

• At least 3 years of experience in a DevOps role, ideally at a B2B SaaS company
• Detailed experience with AWS, including RDS, Lambda, and CloudWatch.
• Experience with GCP, and specifically Google BigQuery.
• Experience with building and maintaining continuous integration environments.
• Absolutely superb communication skills.  You need to be able to communicate effectively across Beacon’s engineering team, and work closely with other engineers to solve challenging problems and optimise processes.

Bonus points

• Experience with IAC tools like Terraform
• Experience with using GitHub Actions to set up continuous integration environments
• Experience with approaches for managing and scaling large SQL databases

Benefits

• Our customers are all charities - you'll get to build your career whilst having a genuinely positive impact on the world
• Four day work week. Our working model gives everyone a 3 day weekend, every week.
• We'll give you 6 weeks (24 days) of holiday every year, plus bank holidays
• 6 week fully paid sabbatical every 5 years
• Taking time off is important. And we really mean it: We'll pay you a £60 bonus for every day of holiday you take
• Banded salary system so that everyone is paid the same for doing the same job, and compensation growth within the organisation is clear.
• Guaranteed pay rise to adjust for inflation every 12 months
• Beacon is climate positive (beyond carbon neutral), so your employment won't hurt the planet. Learn more
• A proper pension - we'll match 150% of your pension contributions (up to 10%)
• Private health insurance with routine dental & optical cover
• Modern parental leave policy (12 weeks at full pay, and it's the same for everyone, regardless of gender or circumstances)
• Cycle to work scheme

Working together

As a team we prefer to be together in our office (4-6 New Inn Broadway, London, EC2A 3PR) and we'd want you to join us - so this is not a remote role. We offer flexible working hours and while your usual place of work will be with us in the office, you can work home when you need to.

If you don’t live in London but would be happy to relocate, we can pay up to £4,000 (tax free) to help with your relocation costs.

We passionately believe in doing our part to address the tech sector's diversity problem

We believe that in building diversity we build strength.

We encourage everyone with the required skills to apply, we consider building a diverse and representative team to be critical to our success, and we actively pursue building a more diverse team.

We have a banded salary system to ensure that nobody is paid differently for the same role. Salaries across the organisation, including executive pay, are entirely transparent.

Our parental leave policy provides for 12 weeks of full pay, and can be taken by any parent, regardless of their new parenting circumstances.

We're delighted to be certified by Bloody Good Period as a ‘Bloody Good Employer’, and we're working towards becoming a certified BCorp.