Platform Engineer

Providing the compute infrastructure that powers bol

How do you make our customers happy?

Team Watt is responsible for providing the compute and shared infrastructure for bol. Our customers are different than you might expect, we provide tools and services to our internal application engineers and not to the bol retailer customers. Team Watt provides compute infrastructure for bolapplication teams in a variety of environments – in our own privately run and managed data centers as well as in the public cloud (GCP). Our goal is to provide compute infrastructure (read: Kubernetes clusters, and RedHat based VMs and bare-metal servers) that operate in highly available and highly scalable environments. What you’ll do as a platform engineer on Team Watt

What are our products?

We refer to our products as our OPEX (Operational Excellence). Our primary product offering is compute infrastructure in both our public cloud (GCP) and datacenter offering. The team provides building blocks like managed kubernetes, storage solutions, mail relay services and baremetal and virtual machines for our 1000+ software engineer colleagues. The team works to secure and innovate these products, providing new functionality to our software development teams and keeping the platform scalable and up-to-date to meet our business needs.

Google kubernetes engine (GKE) is our biggest compute offering by far, allowing software engineer teams to deploy their applications in a self service way while our deployment tooling provides them with the means to do this in a secure and compliance method.

Our datacenter offering provides compute components to both critical service (that are not (yet) moved to the cloud) or those present in our fulfillment centers. All of these services are critical to ensure our logistical components keep running and we keep our customers and partners happy.

What tool-stack will you be working with?

To manage all compute instances at the scale that we have, we use several orchestartion tools. One of them is a homegrown one to offer development teams self-service in GCP, which is based on Terraform, Puppet, Google’s Config Connector and Open Policy Agent.

Within our Datacenters all our servers run RedHat and are fully managed via Puppet. These servers are either physical or virtual machines running on VMware.

One of our motto’s is to not touch things twice, so we try to automate everything as much as possible so we have our hands free for the really fun stuff.

Who is on the team?

You’ll be joining a team of nine individuals – seven platform engineers, one group product manager, and one engineering manager. Our team of platform engineers has a wealth of experience when it comes to building and maintaining infrastructure. Our team is in the critical path for many things at bol, which means that our team has high standards for our quality of work and attention to detail. This team brings a lot of industry experience and has leans towards the senior side in regard to overall experience level.

What will I do?

• Improve our approach to Kubernetes cluster management. Bol is a fast-growing company and we encourage our development teams to innovate. To meet the demand for extra infrastructure we need to innovate on the platform itself keeping the infrastructure saleable, manageable and serving our customer needs.
• Maintain and improve our existing mail infrastructure. Our team is also responsible for inbound and outbound email for all of bol. You'll help us improve and optimize our setup as needed
• Support the needs of our customers (internal application developers). They expect highly available, highly scalable compute infrastructure. You will collaborate on finding solutions and product offerings that help meet the demand of other bol teams
• Collaborate with other teams to build feature-rich products and secure networks. IAM, ingress and egress policies, database and storage, logging and metrics. Our compute infrastructure is connected in a lot of ways, you'll help collaborate to support these other topics as well.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

Why it is:

• Operating at scale
• Our team is responsible for ensuring the continuity, availability and performance of the foundational parts of hundreds of applications. This role is for you if you have experience working in highly trafficked environments.
• Kubernetes Expertise
• We're heavily invested into Kubernetes as our primary tool of choice for managing compute workloads. You feel fluent in the topics of containerization, virtualization, deployment automation, networking and security. You have real world experience working with k8s.
• Results driven
• Our team takes a lot of pride in the work that we do and the results show. We have a very low defect rate, we design systems that hold up through the holiday shopping storm of Black Friday. This position is right for you if you're able to deliver consistently and with solid results.

Why not:

• Focus on Internal Stakeholders
• This role emphasizes supporting internal teams (application engineers) rather than directly impacting end customers. If your passion lies in building customer-facing products or directly shaping user experiences, you may want to ensure this aligns with your career goals.
• Blend of Modern and Established Technologies
• While you’ll work with cutting-edge tools like Kubernetes and GCP, the role also involves maintaining established systems such as RedHat servers and VMware. If you're seeking a role purely focused on greenfield development, this might not fully align with your expectations.
• Commitment to Excellence at Scale
• Team Watt takes pride in delivering high-quality, highly reliable infrastructure for a fast-growing company. This means attention to detail and consistent delivery are key. If you’re looking for a more exploratory or less structured role, this might require a shift in focus.