Senior Engineer, Release Engineering Team

  • Full-time
  • Department: Engineering

Company Description

DNAnexus is the leading cloud-based SaaS company serving the global life science community. DNAnexus’ health informatics platform serves customers across a spectrum of industries — government, biopharmaceutical, clinical diagnostics, healthcare, and academic research in 33 countries with compliant protection of data, privacy, and intellectual property. The platform provides a secure and collaborative environment where genomics, multi-omics, and real world data can be combined with clinical data at scale, providing new insights that can lead to improved diagnostics, new targeted therapies and better patient care.

Job Description

The Release Engineering team at DNAnexus drives the efficient delivery of software from development to production, with security, quality, and resiliency built-in. We are the stewards of our company’s “containerization” initiative, and are leading our transformation towards reproducible and immutable deployments using docker images. We strive to eliminate toil at every step in the software development lifecycle by leaning on automation to accomplish routine tasks. We use CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Drone, and GitHub Actions to drive this process. We are big believers in the power of observability and use tools like Grafana, Prometheus and Cloudwatch to bring transparency into formerly opaque areas. We love open source and bring the latest technology and best practices from the community into the company to solve new and old problems without reinventing the wheel.

As a member of the Release Engineering team, your customers will be your fellow engineers. You’ll act as an evangelist for our suite of tools and services, while keeping an open mind and actively listening to others’ needs to make sure we’re focusing on the right problems. You will create and maintain CI/CD pipelines, implement best practices for shipping containerized services, and work directly with engineering teams to help them leverage our tools. You’ll be part of major decisions such as how to evolve our containerized deployment strategy into its next iteration, evaluating several container orchestration options. And you’ll work closely with our security team to make sure that we are shipping tamper-proof artifacts.

DNAnexus has a culture of science and experimentation at its core, and we’re looking for people who are excited about innovation. On the Release Engineering team, you’ll have the chance to make small improvements that will be amplified into major productivity boosts for the whole company.

About the Role

This is a remote-friendly role, open to anyone legally authorized to work in the United States. We’re open to hiring junior candidates who are passionate about leveling up their skills, as well as more senior candidates who are already well-versed in these job skills.

What You’ll Do

  • Use your Docker skills to migrate legacy services into “Containerized” applications
  • Educate your fellow engineers on best practices for writing containerized services
  • Assist with our journey into Container Orchestration, kicking the tires on Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Elastic Container Service, and others
  • Instrument code with Prometheus client libraries to improve observability
  • Maintain CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins & GitHub Actions
  • Identify opportunities for tightening the “inner loop” of software development with improved tools and automation
  • Harden our defenses by building security into the CI/CD pipeline
  • Lead “Game Days” where we put engineers in the hot seat and simulate failures to practice how to recover

Qualities We're Looking For

  • You are empathetic and seek to understand before being understood. You understand that the right solution might not always be the one you are most familiar with.
  • You are an effective communicator and teacher, and derive a sense of satisfaction from helping your fellow engineers to do their jobs better.
  • You value reproducibility, and believe in disposable infrastructure that can be recreated at a moment’s notice. 
  • You believe in moving quickly, but never at the expense of safety and security.  You are humbled to be a guardian of petabytes of human genomic data.

Minimum Qualifications

  • Familiarity with Docker
  • Fluency in at least one programming language
  • Literacy with shell scripting
  • Experience using a CI/CD tool such as Jenkins and GitHub Actions
  • Experience working in a Linux environment such as Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, etc

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with Docker in a production environment
  • Experience with automation tools such as Ansiblee, Puppet, Chef
  • Experience with AWS services (EC2, Lambda, Kinesis, etc)
  • Experience with Observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, InfluxDB, Splunk, Cloudwatch, etc.
  • Experience coding in NodeJS and Python
  • Experience integrating Cloud Native technologies (CNCF) into legacy systems

Extra Credit

  • Experience using a Container Orchestration service such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or ECS
  • Experience using infrastructure automation tools such as Terraform

Additional Information

Based in Mountain View, California, DNAnexus is experiencing rapid growth and is searching for the best talent to join our team. We recently completed a $100 million financing round to advance our growth globally to further serve leading healthcare and life science organizations. Key investors include Google Ventures, Perceptive Advisors, Northpond Ventures, TPG Biotech, and Foresite Capital.

If you are interested in joining our team, please apply today! 

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Privacy PolicyImprint