Platform Engineer

Vortexa was founded to solve the immense information gap that exists in the energy industry. By using massive amounts of new satellite data and pioneering work in artificial intelligence, Vortexa creates an unprecedented view on the global seaborne energy flows in real-time, bringing transparency and efficiency to the energy markets and society as a whole.

The Challenge

Ingesting data from multiple external vastly different sources at hundreds of rich data points per second, moving terabytes of data while processing it in real-time, running complex and complicated prediction and forecasting AI models while coupling their output into a hybrid human-machine data refinement process and presenting the result through a nimble low-latency SaaS solution used by customers around the globe is no small feat of science and engineering. This processing requires a highly reliable, stable, fault-tolerant infrastructure that can withstand multiple and varied uses and abuses by data analysts, data scientists, industry experts, and the end-users. Fast product iteration cycles necessitate a platform that allows engineers to deploy frequently, independently, and without in-depth knowledge of infrastructure complexities.

The Data Services Team is responsible for the developer platform, and the impressive Amazon AWS estate Vortexa uses to achieve its purpose. This includes two major areas of concern: infrastructure availability, security and costs, as well as developer experience. We use a wide variety of technologies like Kubernetes, Kubevela, Golang, Kafka, Opensearch, Airflow, Athena, and others.

You will be a key member of the small, globally distributed team, instrumental in assessing current technologies, delivering the best possible engineering experience with the shortest development iterations, helping crystallise, converge and standardise technology stacks and implementing the infrastructure roadmap, ensuring 100% uptime, availability, and fault-tolerance of every component of the platform, while optimising AWS costs. You will provide your customers such as data analysts, data scientists, and other engineers with a delightful developer experience tooling boosting their productivity, and allowing them to concentrate on business logic. You will codify and automate any operational knowledge gathered so that R&D can focus purely on creating value for our customers.

Requirements

You Are:

  • Determined to create infrastructure that gets out of the way with a great developer experience
  • Excellent at troubleshooting unfamiliar code.
  • Striving to be more skilled than Google with Kubernetes
  • An AWS power user and evangelist
  • Familiar with Apache Kafka and Kafka Streams – deployment, monitoring, resiliency, fault-tolerance, cluster planning and operations, applications debugging
  • Experienced with ElasticSearch operations and usage
  • Fluent in Terraform, and Go
  • Familiar with cloud-native application design and deployment
  • Not afraid of challenges and infrastructure troubleshooting
  • A “can-do” person – “I’ve done my bit” has no place at Vortexa

Awesome If You:

  • Are familiar with Airflow or other workflow orchestration tools
  • Understand data lakes like Parquet, Orc, Athena

Benefits

  • Stock-options in a fast-growing, high-potential business
  • A vibrant and diverse workplace
  • An open, collaborative, and supportive working culture built on merit, which celebrates creative thinking and “getting things done.”
  • The opportunity to work with AI-driven technology in a scale-up environment with commodity trading experts
  • 401k with up to 2% contributions matched by Vortexa
  • Private Health Insurance offered via Blue Cross Shield
  • Dental and Vision cover offered via Guardian
  • Global Volunteering Policy to help you ‘do good’ and feel better

Every year, Vortexa tracks and predicts over $2 trillion worth of waterborne oil and gas cargo across the globe, painting a comprehensive picture of the global energy market and uncovering trends that shape the world's economy. Today’s reality is that most of our lifestyles are heavily dependent on oil-derived products. From aspirin and surfboards to fuelling your work commute (bike tyres included!), oil plays a significant role in our health, comfort and safety, impacting our day to day. Our platform is improving the accessibility, transparency and efficiency of information to benefit everyone in the energy ecosystem, including trading and shipping, NGOs, regulatory bodies, and consecutively the everyday consumer.At its core, Vortexa generates, collects and analyses global data on seaborne oil and gas cargo movements. Since our launch in 2016, we have aggregated a staggering 146 + TB of data, influencing shipping strategies, supporting news stories and providing context to trades across several commodity exchanges. All of this has been made possible by the rapid growth of satellite technology and the concerted efforts of our experienced analysts, powering our artificial intelligence and machine learning tools. Founded by Fabio Kuhn, former Head of Trading Technology and Analytics at BP, and Etienne Amic, former Head of European Energy at JP Morgan and Mercuria. Working at Vortexa is fast-paced yet extremely rewarding - we set big goals, encourage brave ideas and strive to innovate in everything we do. After all, decisions we make today are set to impact one of the world’s biggest industries tomorrow. By joining our team, you can expect a stimulating environment with a collaborative spirit; all whilst maintaining creative independence and hands-on approach that only a start-up can offer. All of our employees are shareholders, meaning that the entire team is equally committed to Vortexa’s vision. To support you on your journey, we offer private healthcare, monthly workshops led by our team of experts and socials every Friday to thank you for all the hard work put in during the week.As a technology company, we are in a unique position to promote equality, diversity and inclusivity in our industry. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and guarantee all of our team members the same opportunities and rewards regardless of their gender, race, belief system or ability.

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