Senior Platform Engineer

Senior Platform Engineer - 1.0-1.3M NOK

Everything Flowcase provides runs on AWS and Kubernetes, and the Platform team owns all of it: the infrastructure, CI/CD, our authentication and security posture, and the internal DevOps tooling the rest of the business depends on every day. Today that team is one person. You'd be the second.

Being two people changes more than throughput. Every part of the platform gets two people who understand it - no single points of failure (us included) - and designs get argued through before they're built rather than after. You'd report to our Platform Lead, with real latitude in how you solve things and a real say in what we take on and what we build; we want you making your case, including when you disagree (strong opinions, weakly held).

Our product has AI features our customers rely on, our engineers use AI tooling daily, and we've started experimenting with agents and workflows. This is a fast-moving area, with a lot of unknowns, which is part of what makes it interesting. We're after someone who can cut through the hype in either direction, and knows when this is taking real work off an engineer's plate, and when it's just moving it somewhere else.

We use a few different programming languages across our teams and encourage engineers to work across the entire system, so you should enjoy landing in an unfamiliar codebase and finding your feet quickly.

Our stack

We run the entire product in AWS, serving hundreds of companies in over 35 countries:

• Multiple Kubernetes clusters, running primarily on spot instances, with autoscaling powered by Karpenter

• Custom Kubernetes operators, written in Rust, that let developers declare the backing services and routing their apps need

• Tailscale VPN

• Self-hosted GitHub Actions runners for CI/CD

• Grafana and Sentry for observability, with InfluxDB for product metrics

• Postgres, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, and Redis

• A multi-tenant authentication system

Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and extend the AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure that underpins everything Flowcase does.

• Own and improve our authentication and security posture, from identity and access management through to secrets handling, hardening, and patching. As a SOC 2 certified company, Platform carries a significant share of the controls behind that.

• Make it easy for our developers to do the right thing, by making production-readiness (monitoring, alerting, tracing, sane defaults) something teams get by default rather than something they have to figure out for themselves. Product teams deploy several times a day and are expected to own what they ship, but Platform is expected to provide the guidance and tooling to empower them.

• Act as a key stakeholder when new features are being built, helping guide the architecture, and making sure whatever technology we choose will survive a customer's security review, and the SOC 2 audit.

• Develop the internal tools and self-service platforms that make other engineering teams faster and more productive, with a focus on Developer Productivity.

• Choose the right tool for the job, whether that's an infrastructure component, the observability stack or an automation framework, knowing when to build versus when to buy, and be able to explain why.

About you

You thrive in a small, collaborative team, and you'd rather improve the tools another team uses every day than build something only you touch. You like learning, and you like turning what you learn into a better day for every engineer here.

You default to proven tools. Prototype to find out what you actually need, then reach for something off the shelf if possible - the bar for building instead is security, compliance or a genuine gap, not preference. We're not building our own Grafana or Sentry. And you'd rather solve 80% of a problem well rather than over-engineer something whose requirements aren't settled yet.

You hold your opinions in the open. You have a view on what belongs on Kubernetes and what doesn't, you'll defend it when the rest of us disagree, and you'll change it when someone else is right. You share what you know, because anything that only works while you're on it is a problem to fix, not job security. And when something breaks, you're more interested in finding out how it failed, rather than looking for someone to blame.

Technical skills

• Strong experience with Kubernetes and a major cloud platform, ideally AWS.

• Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (most beneficial: Terraform and CloudFormation) and automation (GitHub Actions, Helm, ArgoCD, or similar), with a preference for declarative over scripted.

• Experience building and maintaining observability so teams can understand what their services are doing (e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch etc.), including a view on which signals are worth alerting on, and which would just be noise.

• A solid grasp of authentication, authorisation and security fundamentals in a cloud-native environment.

• Experience running databases in production (PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, Redis).

• Comfort with at least one general-purpose language for building tooling and services (most beneficial: Rust and Ruby).

• A platform-focused mindset: a genuine interest in understanding what other engineering teams need, and building the infrastructure and tools that make their lives easier.

• Experience running production systems, including handling incidents, investigating root causes, practising blameless postmortems, and following through on remediation.

It would be great if you also have

• Experience designing for zero-trust, both in the network and in the code that runs on it: network policies, least-privilege and scoped credentials, sandboxed execution and controlled egress - and a feel for the tradeoffs involved.

• Experience designing or operating distributed systems at scale, particularly event-driven.

What you will get

• 1.0-1.3M NOK salary, depending on experience

• Pension (7% up to 7.1G, 8% above), health and travel insurance

• Offices in central Oslo, with lunch included; two days a week minimum, though many of us are in more often

• Training budget for conferences and courses

• MacBook and iPhone

Twice a year, we all go somewhere for a few days (fully paid) for collaboration, fun, and great food. The next trip is Barcelona in October, and you're welcome to join even if you haven't started yet.

About us

Flowcase is a major SaaS product for winning public tenders, bids, and proposals. Currently being used by market leaders in consulting, engineering, IT and legal firms in over 35 countries, our software helps create and store CV, resume, and case study data. This makes it easy to keep track of employee data and cuts the time it takes to compile a winning bid in half.

Having experienced great success in Europe since Flowcase was founded in 2012, and trusted by industry leaders like PwC, DLA Piper, and Capgemini, we're now expanding in North America. In 2023, we received our first investment from Idékapital, which has enabled us to accelerate our overseas expansion.

Our globally distributed team of 27 talented and friendly individuals is headquartered in Oslo, with offices in London, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Toronto.

We encourage applicants from underrepresented groups to apply for this vacancy. Please note that we can only consider applications from individuals based in Norway who are legally eligible to work.

The interview process

• Interview with VP of Engineering and Lead DevOps Engineer (45-60 mins)

• Technical interview (2 hours)

• Cultural interview (45-60 mins)

If you like one of our open job posts, we encourage you to apply. We are less concerned with a person meeting 100% of the job requirements, and are more interested in working with friendly, genuine, and honest people. Flowcase is made up of caring, empathetic people who lift each other up, and we do not discriminate against any protected group. We are committed to equal opportunities, inclusive working, and fairness for all.