Platform Engineer / Engineering Enablement 

Building services that enable others 

Springer Nature is one of the world’s leading global research, educational and professional publishers. It is home to an array of respected and trusted brands and imprints, with more than 170 years of combined history behind them, providing quality content through a range of innovative products and services. Every day, around the globe, our imprints, books, journals and resources reach millions of people, helping researchers and scientists to discover, students to learn and professionals to achieve their goals and ambitions. The company has around 10,000 staff in over 50 countries. 

We’re looking for an experienced Platform Engineer (m/f/d) to help us shape, build and improve our unified platforms and their integrated capabilities to enable Springer Nature’s product teams to focus on delivering value. 

About us: Engineering Enablement 

The Engineering Enablement department consists of around 60 people, spread over teams that closely collaborate to fulfil our mission. In Springer Nature Technology we serve different core expertise: PaaS, Databases, Observability, Cloud and Release Engineering. You will join a multidisciplinary team with different nationalities, backgrounds and experience levels. We are a very distributed department but sometimes we travel to work with each other in person. We are based around the globe with main locations in London, Dordrecht, Berlin, and Lisbon. 

Our Technology 

We have built platforms serving hundreds of developers around the world at scale. We are making more and more use of Kubernetes as a backend container platform and integrating this into our platform offering. We are leveraging the power of Kubernetes to build a new PaaS that will co-exist with the current Cloud Foundry Platform, as well as managing an internal database platform that runs over 1,200 database servers. 

Your Responsibility 

Together with the team, you will share the responsibility of developing and improving our platforms along with maintenance tasks, documentation, running updates and keeping our systems secure. As a department, we focus and engage on providing a unified and standardised platform by using modern and open standards. Our unified platform approach is encompassed by core capabilities, like observability, continuous integration, security and storage. We therefore closely collaborate within our department so that the core capabilities get tightly integrated and the product teams within Springer Nature are provided with a unified experience. This role is within the Platform Engineering teams, who maintain, develop and scale our PaaS offering. Your initial focus will be on observability tooling across the department. 

Core technologies in use: 

• Cloud Foundry 
• Kubernetes, Kubevela, GKE 
• Grafana LGTM stack, Sentry, Open Telemetry 
• Concourse, GitHub Actions 
• Terraform, Ansible, 
• Postgres, Mongo, MySQL 
• GCP, AWS 

About you 

You are a friendly team member who is modest, humble and open to learning from anyone regardless of age, gender, race, role or experience. You value social interactions and are open to feedback and introspection. You are confident in your abilities but aware of your limitations. You have a strong preference for working together, collaborating across domains and practices, sharing knowledge and training others. You understand the value of doing meaningful and sustainable work rather than implementing temporary fixes to meet arbitrary deadlines. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience in operating and maintaining cloud infrastructure 
• Programming experience with Golang or at least one modern language 
• Experience in contributing to the architecture and design of new and existing systems 
• Managed production Kubernetes resources and deployments using tools and languages like Kubectl, Helm, or Terraform 
• Work in a team context with a focus on collaboration and shared ownership 

Desired Qualifications 

• Written and maintained code that interfaces with the Kubernetes API, such as operators, controllers, add-ons, etc. 
• Written applications using Go and a thorough understanding of its language features and idiomatic practices. 
• Took a project through the full software lifecycle from early designs to production deployments. 
• Experience with some of the core technologies in use 

We are looking forward to getting your application. After reviewing your CV our Talent Acquisition team will contact you to schedule a short initial phone/video call. After getting this first step we will run 2-3 rounds (introductory, technical, cultural) with you - all of these with different members of the Engineering Enablement team. When appropriate these phases will be held via phone /video calls. 

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