Software Engineer - Backend, Cloud

Full-time - Mid Level

San Francisco, CA

About the position

At Nextdoor, Cloud Engineers are responsible for building, deploying, managing, and securing the underlying cloud-based architecture that powers communities on the Nextdoor platform worldwide. These engineers have designed, built and implemented a globally scalable container and 'serverless' based infrastructure that serves billions of requests a day, millions of active users, and hundreds of developers. We build infrastructure and tooling that is iterable, scalable, and secure. We write everything in code from network infrastructure to server management, database provisioning, and data pipelines. Recently we have focused on scaling up our Kubernetes infrastructure. We created a dedicated management cluster to run ArgoCD, Loki, Prometheus, and Grafana. Additionally, we have created a second Kubernetes cluster for Nextdoor applications to ensure we can scale beyond the limitations of a single cluster. This will ensure Nextdoor’s infrastructure is able to scale for many years to come. Additionally our team has focused efforts to modernize our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) by leveraging CDK to manage our AWS resources and Pulumi to manage our other core infrastructure systems such as PagerDuty, Datadog, and Sentry. In past years the team has also built Open Source projects including Kingpin, a deployment automation tool that powers our releases and management of AWS resources, pg-bifrost, a logical replication tool for PostgreSQL, Bender, a serverless ETL framework on AWS Lambda that handles tens of billions of events daily, and smaller projects like code-crypt for storing credentials in code and nd_okta_auth for authenticating to AWS via Okta. We routinely contribute code back to open source projects that we leverage, helping to build better and stronger cloud infrastructure around the world. At Nextdoor, we offer a warm and inclusive work environment that embraces a hybrid employment experience, providing a flexible experience for our valued employees.

Responsibilities

• Building an efficient and scalable container and serverless computing environment for product developers.
• Operationalizing a second Kubernetes cluster to ensure Nextdoor can continue to scale beyond the limits of a single Kubernetes cluster.
• Hardening reliability by building a robust monitoring system to enforce team’s SLOs.
• Building automation for developer workflows including applying 3rd party dependency updates automatically and distributing Helm chart updates.
• Modernizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) by leveraging CDK and Pulumi.
• Optimizing Kubernetes resource management by leveraging Spot Ocean and Karpenter.
• Providing self-service infrastructure-as-code systems to developers that automate the full lifecycle of managing, deploying and operating cloud services.
• Developing tooling for horizontally and vertically autoscaling developer compute workloads.
• Providing upstream open source patches to well-known community projects.

Requirements

• 3+ years experience in a DevOps or Cloud role.
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes (K8S).
• Experience using TypeScript.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (CDK, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Puppet, Salt, Ansible, Terraform, Packer).
• Thorough understanding of Linux and networking protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, HTTP/S, eBPF).
• Strong debugging and performance tuning skills using software like gdb, perf, strace, ltrace, tcpdump, Wireshark, etc.
• Experience with performance, automation, monitoring, and capacity planning.
• Experience automating configuration and bootstrapping of Linux systems.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience using Docker or other containerization software.
• Linux certifications such as Linux+, Network+, RHCSA/RHCE/RHCA or similar.
• Experience in a large scale compute environment with hundreds or thousands of servers.

Benefits

• Starting salary range from $153,000 to $212,000.
• Meaningful equity grant with equal quarterly vesting.
• Variety of health plans including a 100% covered employee only plan.
• OneMedical membership for concierge care.