Founded in 2001, Resident Advisor (RA) is one of the world's longest-running music media brands and a cornerstone of the dance, electronic and DJ ecosystem. The site's audience of over 7 million monthly users is drawn in by a combination of news, editorial, club listings and ticketing, RA-branded events at venues and festivals worldwide, original films and a weekly mix series that has run for 20 years. 

Purpose of the role:

Our Core Platform team is seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help scale and optimize our high-traffic backend infrastructure, which faces unique technical challenges due to massive traffic spikes during peak on-sale events. You'll work with a modern tech stack featuring microservices built in Node.js and .NET, supported by MSSQL and PostgreSQL databases, alongside technologies like ElasticSearch and Redis. Our infrastructure primarily runs on Kubernetes clusters hosted in AWS EKS, managed through Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, with CI/CD pipelines enabling rapid deployments. We embrace event-driven architecture patterns using Kafka and maintain a strong focus on site reliability, leveraging DataDog for comprehensive monitoring to ensure optimal performance.

In this role, you'll be responsible for maintaining and improving the performance, availability, and reliability of our backend infrastructure. You'll drive infrastructure modernization initiatives while optimizing for cost efficiency, and develop critical shared infrastructure components such as authentication/authorization systems and GraphQL gateways. A key part of your impact will be enhancing the developer experience across our engineering teams, maintaining systems that enable comprehensive E2E testing, and creating internal tooling that streamlines business processes company-wide. This is an opportunity to work on challenging scale problems while shaping the technical foundation that powers our platform.

Key responsibilities

• Managing and improving AWS infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code practices
• Database maintenance and query optimization
• Cloud cost optimization and resource efficiency
• Researching, planning, and leading improvements to our backend infrastructure
• Providing functional and technical training and support to developers
• Writing application code to support infrastructure tooling and shared platform services

Required Skills:

• Experience working with AWS
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerized application deployment
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code technologies (Terraform preferred)
• Experience deploying and maintaining SQL-based databases (PostgreSQL or MS SQL Server)
• Experience writing production-level application code
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with git and version control workflows
• Strong documentation writing skills and commitment to knowledge sharing
• Strong interpersonal skills with openness to giving and receiving feedback
• Fluent English communication skills (written and verbal)

Desired Skills:

• Experience with both PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server
• Advanced SQL query optimization skills
• Experience deploying and maintaining Kafka for event-driven architectures
• Experience deploying and maintaining ETL pipelines
• Experience with DataDog for monitoring and alerting
• Deep understanding of Site Reliability Engineering principles and best practices
• Experience with backend languages such as C# and Node.js
• Experience with scripting languages (such as Bash, Python, PowerShell)
• Experience managing high-traffic systems with significant load variations

What we offer you:

• Generous annual leave policies aimed at promoting work-life balance.
• Flexibility in working arrangements, offering hybrid or remote work options based on role requirements and location. 
• Matching pension schemes and/or 401k.
• Comprehensive staff wellbeing initiatives, featuring regular activities and workplace programmes to support mental and physical health. This includes discounted Classpass memberships, and custom-fitted earplugs.
• Company-led social events, team lunches, and discounts on RA merch.
• Paid annual volunteering allowance, encouraging contributions to community projects and charities you care about.
• Regular company-wide Q&A’s with senior leadership, along with ongoing virtual educational training sessions for all staff.
• A transparent internal company culture committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (see: https://ra.co/about/diversity).
• Active involvement in community projects within the electronic music community (see:  https://ra.co/about/community).

More about RA:

As an independent company run by devoted dance music enthusiasts, our mission is to bring together the world's electronic music communities. Our Global Content Network (GCN) and international teams help us establish connections with hyper-niche local scenes. 

We became B-Corp certified in 2024, which counts us among businesses leading a global movement for an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy and part of a community that meets high social and environmental impact standards.

We especially welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds, abilities, ethnicities, experiences, gender identities, and sexual orientations. We aim for our team to reflect the communities we engage with. We ensure everyone is valued and respected by actively promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion in our workplace.

Our values:

• Electronic music is art.
• We celebrate the progressive values that underpin electronic music.
• We advocate for a more inclusive and equitable electronic music community.
• We honour the past, present and future of electronic music.
• We use innovation to empower the community.
• We choose honesty over gain and purpose over profit.
• We're always front left.

This role is a full-time role. Please note: This position requires applicants to be based in London, Manchester, Madrid or Berlin, and to work from the office three days per week. The annual salary range for this role is:

London: £62,000 - £72,000

Manchester: £55,000 - £65,000

Berlin: €62,000 - €72,000

Madrid: €62,000 - €72,000

This listing will be open for a minimum of two weeks from the 23rd of January. Please be sure to add work@ra.co to your contacts and check your junk/spam folder for emails from us.