Senior Software Engineer
$70,000–$85,000 year
HybridLondon, England, United Kingdom
Job Summary
Provide high-quality L2.5 support for PHP applications on EKS with MySQL, executing scripted remediation, configuration changes, and safe code-level fixes within defined guardrails. Automate repetitive tasks and maintain runbooks to reduce manual toil and improve MTTR. Act as a first responder for application incidents, triaging, diagnosing, and coordinating remediation using Datadog, Kibana, and Heap for impact analysis. Contribute to service onboarding reviews, post-incident learning, and operational KPI reporting. Work in a hybrid model with a sustainable on-call rotation and collaborate with product teams to enhance operational capabilities.
Required Qualifications
- Proven experience in application support or operations engineering in cloud environments, ideally supporting PHP services running on Kubernetes (EKS) with MySQL backends
- Hands-on capability in at least one backend language (PHP preferred; Python or similar also valuable) sufficient to read, diagnose, and write safe operational scripts and minor fixes under guardrails
- Practical Kubernetes skills for operations: kubectl/Helm basics, investigating pods/deployments, reading logs/events, understanding readiness/liveness probes, and performing safe rollouts/rollbacks within documented guardrails
- MySQL operational fluency: connection and pool issues, slow query detection, query plan basics, common remediation patterns (e.g., indexing recommendations to hand to L3, safe data fixes under runbook guardrails), and understanding of replication/backup implications
- Strong experience using Datadog (APM/metrics/traces/dashboards/alerts) for investigation and detection; confident using Kibana for log exploration and correlation; ability to leverage Heap to assess user impact and prioritize remediation
- Familiarity with ITSM tooling (e.g., Jira Service Management) and ITIL-aligned incident and problem management processes
- Strong communication skills; clear, concise documentation; collaborative approach focused on reducing toil, increasing automation, and raising the quality bar
- This role offers a hybrid work model to be present in our London office twice a week
- Standard hours are 9am - 6pm, Mon - Fri
- 1 day in every 4 is on call, paid at 1.5x hourly rate
- On call hours are 6pm - 9am
- If your on call day falls on a weekend, 24 hour on call cover is required
Desired Qualifications
- Python
- Experience with feature flag platforms and configuration-as-code within safe operational guardrails
- Familiarity with AWS services that commonly interface with PHP/EKS workloads (e.g., CloudWatch, ALB, S3, SQS) and how they surface in Datadog and Kibana
- Exposure to service onboarding/operability reviews, SLOs, and contributing to a Service Catalogue
- Experience balancing incident response with proactive improvement work in Agile contexts; strong documentation discipline
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