Senior SRE
At Aserto, we want to help every SaaS application become a great enterprise application.
A big part of being a great enterprise application is having a great authorization system. But today, authorization is broken. We founded Aserto to fix it.
Aserto is a cloud-native authorization service that provides fine-grained, real-time access control for SaaS applications. Like developer APIs such as Stripe, Twilio, and Auth0, we have to operate a highly available, planet-scale service. That sounds like a typical SRE job.
But unlike these APIs, which tend to be asynchronous with respect to the calling application, authorization happens in the critical performance path of handling an application request, and there may be dozens or even hundreds of authorization calls during an application session. Because of this, we believe authorization must happen close to the application. An authorization service has to measure its latency budget in milliseconds, and be 100% available to the calling application.
To deliver on all of this, authorization requires a hybrid architecture:
- a local authorizer that is delivered as a sidecar and runs in the same pod as the application logic
- a central control plane that manages policy lifecycle, pushes policy to the edge, and aggregates logs from the edge back into the control plane
To sum it up, authorization is a harder distributed systems problem than most developer services. That’s why we love working here, and think you will too.
Of course, Aserto uses Aserto for its own authorization. We operate the service not just for our customers, but also for ourselves. We have a set of multi-tenant services that we run in K8S, and use Aserto to provide access control for our services, both to keep us honest and because it’s the best way to authorize them!
We’re looking for a senior site reliability / devops engineer to help us lay down the tracks for how we deliver our software in this hybrid distributed systems architecture, and to help us run a highly available, high-performance, low-latency service.
You’re equally comfortable owning and managing K8S clusters, GitOps, CI/CD systems, cloud environments, and all the observability and monitoring tools that ensure that our service is up, and when it gets unhealthy, we know about it quickly. You are passionate about shaving milliseconds of latency and getting another ‘9’ of availability. You deeply understand security patterns and how to run isolated, hardened environments.
What do we mean by “Senior”? You clearly have significant experience running backend services and infrastructure in professional environments, while working for SaaS and/or developer-centric companies. Experience and education matters, and you’ve clearly got both. But code talks even more. Show us what you’ve built!
We look for people who are humble, hungry, empathetic, and continuous learners. Aserto was born during the pandemic, and we have a remote-first culture… but we can’t wait until we can bring the company together in semi-annual global events.