Overview

Vox Media employees thrive on innovation and change while ambitiously seeking to master their subject areas, hone their craft, and improve their communities. We help smart, talented, creative professionals make a meaningful impact in media, technology and the world around them. The Vox Media house of networks includes industry-leading media forces like SB Nation, Eater, The Verge, Vox, Curbed, Recode, Racked and Polygon, and reaches an audience of hundreds of millions, generating over a billion content views each month.

Vox Media is seeking a Director of SRE to join our Engineering team.

We are building something great, and our leadership group recognizes that in order to build and operate a great platform, we need great infrastructure and a great SRE team. To that end, we are hiring the best people and giving them a simple mandate: to make our platform as stable, secure, and performant as can be.

We will provide leadership and direction but we will not micromanage; we trust you to perform, and your results will speak for themselves. We are honest and upfront with you and we will maintain an open line of communication, understanding that it goes both ways. You will not wait for feedback. We don’t believe in walls. What that means is the classic problem of tossing work over a wall to let the next group deal with does not happen here. We are a highly collaborative team, and you can expect to work with team members across engineering, support, editorial, revenue, and management.

What you’ll do:

  • Lead the effort to build and manage a talented team of engineers that is responsible for the design, planning, implementation and operation of our network, server and service infrastructure.
  • Ensure that Vox Media’s services are performant, scalable, highly-available, and cost-effective.
  • Articulate a strategic vision for the future of technical operations at Vox Media and work directly with engineering team members and leadership to execute that vision.
  • Promote infrastructure as code (IaC) and integrated CI/CD for infrastructure provisioning and deployment.
  • Develop strategic relationships with key vendors and internal business units.
  • Provide high levels of system monitoring with an understanding of reliability, availability, and failure management/mitigation needs.
  • Provide disaster recovery solutions to maintain stable, secure, and compliant environments.
  • Manage the operational and fiscal activities of the department including staffing levels, budgets, operational controls and processes, and financial goals.
  • Communicate plans and ensure that systems are consistent with technology and engineering direction.

What you’ll bring:

  • You have experience working with production web application stacks at scale. You have made performance tweaks and optimizations at the system level, in your network hardware, in the database, and in the application stack. DDoS attacks are part of the job you’ve come to accept—but you have a point of view on how to mitigate them.
  • You know the value of configuration management and have a point of view on how the process should work. Perhaps you have extended a CM system’s functionality in some clever way. Maybe you’ve open-sourced your work.
  • You have a healthy paranoia, you acknowledge your fears but will face them having full confidence in your own abilities and in the research and testing you’ve done ahead of time, and in your solid rollback plan.
  • You acknowledge that many people do not have the same level of expertise in your field as you do, and you accept that as not a flaw but simply a difference. You are even-keeled—not getting too high on the highs but also not getting too low on the lows.
  • You perform well under pressure and can come up with clever improvisations on the fly, but you’re happiest when building durable long-term solutions.
  • You really love this stuff.

About working at Vox Media: This is a permanent, full-time position with excellent benefits—including flexible hours and generous parental leave. Vox Media strives to provide comprehensive healthcare options for our employees and to ensure that our healthcare and other benefits are LGBTQ-inclusive. You’ll be joining a group of focused, hard-working, creative people who are passionate about doing work that’s challenging and fun—and who strive to maintain a healthy work/life balance.

Vox Media is committed to building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and everyone is encouraged to apply. Vox Media is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, disability, national origin, protected veteran status, age, or any other status protected by applicable national, federal, state, or local law.