Senior Software Engineer (Site Reliability)

Akeneo is the product experience (PX) company and global leader in Product Information Management (PIM); creating a world where every product interaction is an experience that guides consumers and professionals to the best purchase, anytime, anywhere. Akeneo empowers business leaders with software, education, and an engaged community all focused on the practice of product experience management.
At Akeneo, our teammates are the driving force behind who we are and where we want to go as a company. We work every day to shape a first-class work environment and culture, which is rooted in our core values of Humble Hunger, Diligent Benevolence, Responsible Pioneers and Inclusive Community! Our Purple Fire isn't just a set of values; it's our unique way of igniting passion and driving excellence. Bold and fun, with a hint of the unexpected - it is the essence of who we are. We want our people to help us grow and to grow with us, and that's why we do whatever it takes to equip our employees with everything they may need to make a tangible impact on themselves, the business and the company. Let our intrepid three-headed mascot #ZiggyTheHydra welcome you into her world and join us at Akeneo! Learn more about who we are as an employer and about our Culture and Values via our Career page .
Job description
We are seeking a talented Senior Software Engineer with a focus on Site Reliability to join us. At Akeneo, engineers work across the full stack while maintaining deep expertise in their preferred discipline - whether that's reliability, frontend, or backend. We embrace a 'you build it, you run it' philosophy, meaning you'll own features from development through production and long-term maintenance, while having the opportunity to contribute across our entire platform, both on infrastructure and application code.
Our organisation is structured similarly to AWS, with each Product Line operating independently under a Single Threaded Owner (STO) at VP level. Within each Product Line, multiple Area Single Threaded Owners (Area-STOs) at Director level oversee several Impact Teams. Each Impact Team, led by an Impact Owner, comprises approximately eight engineers, designers and PMs who work autonomously, following their own processes and methodologies.
This Senior Engineer role is for either our Product Modelling Experience, Automation & AI, Assets or Collaboration Impact teams, the exact team will be decided based on your performance during the general interview loop (see below). Reporting directly to your chosen team's Impact Owner, who is either a Senior Product Manager or an Engineering Manager, you will collaborate closely with teams of engineers, product managers, designers and external stakeholders.
Responsibilities

• Technical Excellence: Design and implement robust, scalable software and infrastructure as code (IaC) solutions for complex problems (e.g., designing and implementing a new service outside of the existing monolith to handle product data enrichment, improving system scalability and performance, creating Terraform modules to automate GCP infrastructure deployment, implementing automated scaling policies)
• Impact & Customer Centricity: Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define, design, and ship solutions to our customer problems (e.g., creating a prototype of a possible solution to customer issues after participating in a customer call, creating automated failover systems, developing playbooks for common failure scenarios)
• Code Quality & System Reliability: Improve system availability and performance, write clean, maintainable, and efficient code (e.g., refactoring a legacy module to improve code readability and reduce technical debt. Reducing service latency by 40% through caching implementation, achieving 99.99% uptime through redundancy)
• Team Work: Participate in code reviews and provide constructive feedback to other developers (e.g., reviewing pull requests and suggesting improvements in algorithm efficiency or code structure, suggesting improvements to monitoring configurations, collaborating on incident postmortems)
• Mentorship: Mentor software engineers and contribute to the growth of the engineering team (e.g., pairing with software engineers on complex tasks and organising knowledge-sharing sessions on best practices, training runbooks procedures, leading chaos engineering workshops)
• Debugging & Optimisation: Troubleshoot, debug, and optimise application and infrastructure performance (e.g., identifying and resolving bottlenecks in database queries to improve overall system response time, rightsizing Kubernetes clusters based on usage patterns, implementing autoscaling policies)
• Innovation: Stay up-to-date with emerging trends and technologies in software development (e.g., researching and proposing the adoption of new technologies like GraphQL for API development, exploring AIOps tools for automated incident response, developing custom SLO monitoring solutions)

Qualifications

• Experience: You have 4**+ years of experience** in hands-on software development, with a strong background in building SaaS solutions, infrastructure, reliability, observability, monitoring. Preferably GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, PHP, Go, Datadog.
• Track Record: You have a history of delivering impact end-to-end as well as taking ownership of projects.
• Technical Expertise: You possess in-depth knowledge of site reliability principles, understanding of software development principles and have successfully built solutions that scale.
• Communication Skills: You can effectively communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and work very well within a diverse team.
• Adaptability: You thrive in a fast-paced, impact focused environment and can handle uncertainties and changing requirements.
• Mentoring Skills: You have demonstrated that you can mentor and grow others in previous roles, guiding less experienced engineers through challenges so they can deliver impact.

Life at Akeneo
Culture
Diverse, cross-cultural team.
Annual All Staff gathering week, office parties, team offsites
Top-notch 8-week onboarding program for new teammates, including live presentations, online courses you can take at your own pace, and an exhaustive checklist with all the resources, calls-to-action and support contacts for smooth integration into the company
General
Competitive package and complementary health insurance.
Time off
Flexible working hours and hybrid setup (up to 3-4 days per week working from home).
26 weeks paid maternity leave (30 days paid leave if you are the second parent).
Gradual Return to Work program after maternity or adoption leave.
25 days holiday per calendar year in addition to UK Public Holidays.
️ Work from Anywhere Scheme - Explore the possibility of working from anywhere in the world for up to 30 days per year.
Health & Wellness
Individual and confidential coaching sessions with a mental health practitioner of your choice.
Equipment
Best-in-class communication and collaboration tools: Slack, Notion, Google Suite, Jira, GitHub...
A £450 personal hybrid working allowance to maximize your home office environment.
Professional Development
Participation in in-house events welcoming external guests (i.e. Meetups) or industry events.
A £1,000 learning budget per employee per year.
Perks & Discounts
An £80/month Sustainable Transportation Allowance to support eco-friendly commuting options such as public transportation, biking, or carpooling if eligible.
Corporate Responsibility
Employee Volunteering program: give back to the community with two days per year dedicated to supporting the charities of your choice.
Join one or several of our Employee Resource Groups and take an active part in promoting diversity and inclusion within our company.
Diversity & Inclusion: Akeneo provides and ensures a safe work environment for everyone, regardless of seniority, gender identity, and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other characteristics. Akeneo is deeply anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, and inclusive. We create the right conditions for you to feel safe and be yourself!
Interview process
All interviews will be conducted remotely and ideally within two weeks, depending on your availability. We are asking for a total of around six hours of your time. There are no take home exercises, coding tests or surprises. We will not continue the process if you do not pass a step, this is to save you time and effort. If we decided not to move forward we will provide you with feedback.

• Screening
  • Phone Screen: If your application has caught our attention, you will receive an invitation to a short conversation with one of our Talent Acquisition Specialists, where you'll learn more about the role and about Akeneo. You will be asked to send through "Code You Are Proud Of" which will be used to validate that you are able to start the interview loop and during the technical interview to aid discussion and deep dive into decision making.
  • Hiring Manager Chat: This short interview will allow you to go in more depth into what the role entails and discuss your experience and skills.
• General Interview Loop: These interviews ensure you are qualified to join Akeneo and that you have what the Product Line needs at this point in time. Before each interview you will receive an email detailing the types of questions you will be asked and who your interviewers will be so you can research and prepare.
  • Technical Deep Dive: You will be asked to bring "Code You Are Proud Of" to discuss and go deep within the 90 minutes interview with a Staff Engineer. You will also discuss how you would solve an Akeneo specific complex problem with limited knowledge and understanding. The Staff Engineer is looking to see how you think critically, expose gaps, navigate ambiguity, focus on impact and execute.
  • Behavioural Deep Dive: You will spend 90 minutes with a cross-functional panel of peers. They are looking to see what it's like to work with you and how you add to our values. This interview relies heavily on examples from your past, so take some time to think back and write down some so you are best prepared. We want to emphasise that the purpose of this interview is not to "test" you. Instead, our goal is to create an environment and opportunities for you to express yourself fully, allowing us to understand your years of experience in a short timeframe. We encourage you to think of the interviewers as collaborators, there to ensure you have every opportunity to shine. We're genuinely interested in learning about your experiences, thought processes, and approaches to problem-solving.
• Team Interviews: The general interview loop will assess your technical skills, personality and how you can add to our culture. During this process we will gain an understanding of where you fit best within the organisation and will select the team.
  • Area-STO & Impact Owner: You will spend an hour with the leaders of the team we feel you are best suited to. They will discuss what they are working on, some of the challenges they are facing and will be keen to see how you might be able to help.
  • Team Meet: Your entire team will want to meet you at this point for an hour to see if you are someone that they would like to work with and learn from. The team will be curious about you as a person and what you want for your next chapter.
• Offer

At all stages of your recruitment process, our Talent Acquisition team is committed to giving you an update in a one-week time frame.
So? Is this job description all about you? Then what are you waiting for - click that Apply button so that we can meet you without further delay!
Feeling hesitant because you think you're not checking 100% of the requirements for the job, but still feel confident and motivated to grow into the position? Don't hesitate to apply anyway, or reach out to us for questions or clarifications!