Hi everybody! We're (Roblox) building a Site Reliability Operations team to take some of the operations load off Site Reliability Engineering to give us space to automate stuff, as well as to give us a way to bring people in with a diverse array of backgrounds who might be interested in a career path that leads to being a software engineer or site reliability engineer.
This is a contract role with the potential to go permanent, which is why it's not on our careers page. (Continued)
The types of candidates I imagine us hiring for the role could be folks straight out of college, people who majored in something other than CS who want to dip their toes in the web operations waters, people who didn't go to college at all but run a few servers of their own, people looking for a career change, and probably other situations I haven't thought of. (Continued)
We're considering a wide array of desired career paths as well, whether it's SRE or software engineering or continuing to work off a task/alert board.
Programming, incident management (i.e. emergency response of any kind), operations (including running a pig farm), writing, leading projects of any sort, all these are useful skills for the role. We're considering "sum total" of skills and potential.
And since there's no "easy" way to say this, I'm just gonna come out and say it: we consider having a background that's different from the folks we already have to be a qualification in itself.
@freakazoid
Is this a traditional or remote work type of job? Is this Roblox as in the online multiplayer game/world thing?
@kelbot Sorry, I forgot to mention location! I hate it when recruiters do that to me. Someone who can work in San Mateo, California (about midway between San Francisco and San Jose) would be ideal, but we're willing to consider remote folks on a case-by-case basis. There will be stronger requirements for remote folks. We're also thinking of leasing office space at our datacenter in Virginia so that could be an option as well.
@kelbot And yes, Roblox is the online multiplayer game/world thing. https://www.roblox.com/ or search for Roblox on your favorite privacy-destroying, attention-invading video silo.
@freakazoid
Ok, thanks for the info. I would not be able to relocate to those locations but I would be interested in hearing what the remote requirements would be.
@kelbot The person would have to be able to work pretty independently, already know Windows and Powershell or Linux and containers and/or programming/scripting reasonably well. Experience with stuff like InfluxDB, Elastic Search, Terraform, Nomad, Kubernetes, AWS or GCE, or similar would be a big plus.
The main "non-negotiable" skill is persistence in the face of incomplete information. Someone who tends to just wait if they don't have all the information they need probably won't be successful in the role, because by its very nature the kinds of requests the team will handle will be ambiguous and require research, including getting in touch with people directly to ask questions. As such, the ability to get your point across and extract information from other people are also important.