Senior DevOps SRE

Senior DevOps SRE
Ascend is a fast-growing SaaS company that helps mid-market and large enterprise customers automate accounts payable processing through text extraction, machine learning and powerful integration into their financial systems – saving them millions each year. Our clients include household names like NASCAR, Panera, Virgin Voyages, Life Time Fitness and PGA Tour as well as many of the nation’s largest and most renown hospitals and health systems, financial services providers, and higher ed institutions.
 
Ascend is a fully remote company that offers competitive pay, exceptional benefits and unlimited time off. Most importantly, we offer the chance to learn, take ownership and build your career the way you’ve envisioned.
 
What would you do at Ascend?
The Senior DevOps SRE’s mission is to design, architect, deploy, and maintain enterprise class SaaS infrastructure, monitoring, observability, traceability, tooling, and automation. This role leverages knowledge in development to enhance, modify, engineer, and create solutions to complex problems by proactive measures. The Senior DevOps Engineer is inquisitive and constantly looks for ways to be proactive rather than reactive, driving solutions to issues before they become problems. This Engineer shows great initiative and mentorship, focusing on growing the entire team.
The salary range for this position is $140,000 - $150,000.
 
Your day-to-day would include:

• Debug production issues across services and levels of the stack.
• Plan the growth of Ascend’s infrastructure
• Deliver on system SLAs by implementing necessary best practices
• Monitor systems and take corrective actions per guidelines
• Think through security issues and implement controls to prevent and resolve vulnerabilities
• Perform research and POC's for new software to improve performance and stability
• Manage and improve our log analysis systems to ensure optimal search and reporting times

 
What is Ascend looking for in a candidate?
Minimum Qualifications & Credentials

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or demonstrable work experience (evidence will be required)
• 7 years’ experience in one or more infrastructure roles (DevOps, TechOps, SRE, ITOps …) 
• 2 years’ experience in a senior level role with proven success 

Soft Skills

• Great people skills paired with a high level of assertiveness
• Strong sense of urgency, attention to detail, and ability to prioritize
• Strong leadership, interpersonal, analytical, problem solving, negotiating, facilitation, organizational, prioritization, and decision-making skills
• Diplomat - broker agreement, manage expectations, influence, and partner across the company
• Track Record of Success - has beaten success metrics 90% of the time throughout their career
• Staying Power & Positive Attitude - loves the challenge; can weather the storm

Hard Skills

• Deep experience with Amazon Web Services (EC2, RDS, Lambdas & other AWS high level abstractions)
• Expertise in Linux system administration, TLS, DNS, TCP and HTTPS
• 3 years’ experience with configuration management tooling with products like Ansible and Terraform
• Experience with observability, monitoring and metrics (Cloudwatch, Prometheus, Grafana)
• Experience with CI/CD (Jenkins, Circle CI, GitHub actions)

 
Why should you apply?

• We offer everything you’d expect from a profitable company including a great salary, comprehensive health care benefits (100% covered for employees, 50% for dependents), and a generous retirement plan match.
• You’ll receive an annual Lifelong Learning Allowance to use towards learning opportunities of your choice (cooking lessons, dance lessons, language lessons, etc.)
• You’ll receive flexible time off, 10 paid holidays, Flex Fridays during the summer and one week off between Christmas and New Year’s.
• A platform for good: a culture of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, charity matching and volunteer days—creating belonging for all is in our DNA both inside and outside of work.
• Remote-first culture. No matter where you are, you’ll feel connected to the team.
• We take family seriously and offer flexible schedules and generous parental leave programs.
• We give you great tools and tech to do your best work: Hardware, software, and home office setups.

 
Our Interview and Hiring Process
 
We want the best people on our team. To get them, we’ve built our hiring process around three Ts: thorough, transparent and thoughtful. Our interview process is an honest evaluation of what you’ve done, what you’re good at, and what you’re working on improving. The goal of this process is to identify, as objectively as possible, people who will raise the level of play within our company.
 
Here's how it works:

• Application
• Screening interview – phone call (30-60 minutes)
• Deep dive interview with the hiring manager – video call (90+ minutes)
• Focused interviews with select potential teammates – 2 video calls (45 mins each)
• Reference calls with your last several managers
• Offer letter