Software Engineer - Backend, Cloud

#TeamNextdoor

Nextdoor is where you connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you so you can belong. Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.

Neighbors around the world turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, get things done, and build real-world connections with those nearby — neighbors, businesses, and public services. Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in more than 335,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries.

Meet Your Future Neighbors

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.

The Impact You’ll Make

You will be responsible for building an efficient and scalable container and serverless computing environment for our product developers. In this team you will work in the ways of reliability engineering, design scalable systems from the ground up, and generally build systems that never page you! Your primary customers will be our Platform, Data, and Security teams. 

Here are just some of our current areas of focus:

• Operationalizing a second Kubernetes cluster to ensure Nextdoor can continue to scale beyond the limits of a single Kubernetes cluster
• Hardening our reliability by building a robust monitoring system to enforce our team’s SLOs
• Building automation for our developer’s workflows including applying 3rd party dependency updates automatically as well as distributing Helm chart updates
• Modernizing our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) by leveraging CDK and Pulumi
• Optimizing our 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 including blob/block storage, relational databases, key-value databases, caches and document search services
• Developing tooling for horizontally and vertically autoscaling our developers compute workloads
• Providing upstream open source patches to well known community projects like AWS Bottlerocket, the Istio Service Mesh, Keiko IAM Manager, Kyverno, Strimzi.io’s Kafka Operator and more!
• Participate in in-person Nextdoor events, trainings, off-sites, volunteer days, and other team building exercises
• Build in-person relationships with team members and contribute to the KIND culture that Nextdoor values

What You’ll Bring to The Team

• 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

Bonus Points

• 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

Rewards

Compensation, benefits, perks, and recognition programs at Nextdoor come together to create one overall rewards package.

The starting salary for this role is expected to range from $153,000 to $212,000 on an annualized basis, or potentially greater in the event that your 'level' of proficiency exceeds the level expected for the role. Compensation may also vary by geography.

We also expect to award a meaningful equity grant for this role. With equal quarterly vesting, your first vest date would be within the first 3 months of your start date.

Overall, total compensation will vary depending on your relevant skills, experience, and qualifications.

When it comes to benefits, we have you covered! Nextdoor employees can choose between a variety of health plans, including a 100% covered employee only plan, and provide a OneMedical membership for concierge care.

At Nextdoor, we empower our employees to build stronger local communities. To create a platform where all feel welcome, we want our workforce to reflect the diversity of the neighbors we seek to serve. We encourage everyone interested in our mission to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or any other trait that unfairly targets a group of people. In accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we always consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

For information about our collection and use of applicants’ personal information, please see Nextdoor's Personnel Privacy Notice, found here.