Principal Cloud Engineer

#TeamNextdoor

Nextdoor is where you connect to the neighborhoods that matter to you so you can belong. Our purpose is to cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on.

Neighbors around the world turn to Nextdoor daily to receive trusted information, give and get help, get things done, and build real-world connections with those nearby — neighbors, businesses, and public services. Today, neighbors rely on Nextdoor in more than 305,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries.

Meet Your Future Neighbors

The Core Platform team focuses on creating a delightful developer experience that empowers engineers to build their features quickly and safely. We build paved roads so that product engineers can focus their efforts on building features that serve our neighbors and drive our business. We create infrastructure that makes the easy things work out of the box and the hard things possible. We build performance and scalability into the platform itself so that Nextdoor is safe and fast by default.

The Impact You’ll Make

As a Technical Lead on the Cloud Engineering team, you will be responsible for driving the design, scalability, and reliability of Nextdoor’s cloud platform. We’re on the cutting edge of modern cloud orchestration and are currently more than halfway through the migration from ECS to Kubernetes with a heavy focus on replacing homegrown infrastructure with open source infrastructure. Recent projects have included migrating our homegrown autoscaler for asynchronous compute to KEDA, replacing ALBs with the Istio service mesh, fixing bugs in Istio’s zone-aware routing logic, and making Prometheus horizontally scalable. Future projects will include supporting the Core Services team to build a horizontally scalable and globally replicated data layer to replace our existing vertically partitioned Postgres databases, improving the ergonomics and security of our cloud platform, scaling our compute from 10K pods to 100K pods, and supporting our product teams better with improved self-service tools.

Some of the areas you might focus on are

• Building elastic and scalable container fleets with proven and measurable scaling response times, massive horizontal scaling capacity, and automatic failure remediation
• Automated controls around cloud configuration, compliance management, and identity and access management (IAM) security systems
• Providing self-service infrastructure-as-code systems to developers that automate the full lifecycle of managing, deploying and operating cloud services including blob/block storage, relational databases, key-value databases, caches and document search services
• Developing tooling for horizontally and vertically autoscaling our compute workloads
• Tuning Linux kernels for high throughput containerized environments running tens of thousands of containers. Providing upstream open source patches to well known community projects like AWS Bottlerocket, the Istio Service Mesh, Keiko IAM Manager, Kyverno, Strimzi.io’s Kafka Operator and more

What You’ll Bring To The Team

• 8+ years of experience in a Systems Infrastructure role
• Experience with scaling cloud-based infrastructure
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes (K8S)
• Belief in infrastructure as code and enjoys working in a GitOps environment
• Thorough understanding of Linux and networking protocols (TCP/IP, UDP, eBPF)
• Strong debugging and performance tuning skills using software like gdb, perf, strace, ltrace, tcpdump, Wireshark, etc
• Experience with performance, automation, monitoring, and capacity planning

Bonus Points

• Operational experience managing Redis, ElasticSearch and PostgreSQL at-scale
• Experience in a large scale compute environment with thousands of servers

At Nextdoor, we empower our employees to build stronger local communities. To create a platform where all feel welcome, we want our workforce to reflect the diversity of the neighbors we seek to serve. We encourage everyone interested in our purpose to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age, or any other trait that unfairly targets a group of people. 

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