ABOUT EQUALS
Equals is the world's largest social music network with over a million users, growing exponentially month to month. We connect people through the music they love - fans discover new people, collect tracks, and connect in artist chatrooms. Our platform serves users across the world with real-time chat, music streaming, and a recommendation engine that matches people by musical taste.
THE ROLE
We're looking for a Site Reliability Engineer to own the infrastructure, observability, and operational health of the Equals platform. You'll be the person who monitors systems needs and health to provide a seamless user experience while providing traceability of system needs or failures.
This is a sole-ownership role. You'll be responsible for our entire cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring stack, data pipelines, and database performance. You'll work closely with our engineers but your focus is the platform underneath - not feature development.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
Infrastructure & Cloud
- Manage and evolve our AWS infrastructure via Pulumi (TypeScript): ECS/Fargate services, RDS (PostgreSQL 17), ElastiCache (Redis with read replicas), S3, SQS, ALB, Lambda
- Scale infrastructure up and down for large data operations (e.g. music catalog ingestion of 1B+ rows)
- Manage Cloudflare (WAF, bot management, DNS, firewall rules)
- Make cost-conscious infrastructure decisions - right-sizing instances, storage tiering, optimizing spend
Monitoring & Observability
- Own the Datadog APM setup: tracing, alerting, dashboards, log management
- Maintain and tune alert channels integrated with Slack
- Reduce alert fatigue by tuning thresholds, suppressing false positives, and downgrading non-actionable errors
- Be the first responder when something breaks in production
Reliability & Incident Response
- Investigate and resolve production incidents end-to-end: detection, root cause analysis, fix, and post-mortem
- Handle database performance issues: slow query identification, index creation, query optimization, connection pool tuning
- Manage queue system reliability (BullMQ on Redis): concurrency tuning, rate limiting, stalled job handling, autoscaling
- Ensure graceful handling of failovers, deployments, and edge cases across all services
Data Pipelines & Warehouse
- Manage the Airbyte replication pipeline from production database to data warehouse
- Configure incremental replication for new tables as the product evolves
- Maintain the data warehouse (PostgreSQL): autovacuum tuning, memory parameters, capacity planning
- Manage RudderStack for event streaming to analytics (Amplitude) and attribution (AppsFlyer)
CI/CD & Deployment
- Own CircleCI pipeline configuration and reliability
- Manage ECS deployment strategies, health checks, and rollout verification
- Maintain test environments and cleanup automation
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Must Have
- Strong experience with AWS (ECS/Fargate, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, ALB, SQS at minimum)
- Infrastructure-as-code experience - ideally Pulumi, but Terraform or CDK background is fine
- Deep PostgreSQL knowledge: performance tuning, indexing strategies, query optimization, connection pooling
- Experience with Redis at scale: clustering, read replicas, failover handling
- Solid understanding of container orchestration and deployment strategies
- Experience with monitoring and observability platforms (Datadog preferred)
- Comfort with incident response: you've been paged at 2am and know how to stay calm, diagnose, and fix
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI, GitHub Actions, or similar)
Nice to Have
- Experience with Pulumi specifically (TypeScript)
- Experience with data replication tools (Airbyte, Fivetran, or similar)
- Experience with event streaming platforms (RudderStack, Segment, or similar)
- Familiarity with BullMQ or similar Redis-based queue systems
- Experience with Cloudflare (WAF, bot management)
- Familiarity with NestJS / Node.js backend architectures (you won't be building features, but understanding how the backend works helps you support it)
- Experience scaling platforms through rapid growth phases
OUR STACK
Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, SQS, ALB, Lambda), Pulumi (TypeScript)
Security/CDN: Cloudflare (WAF, bot management, DNS)
Monitoring: Datadog APM
CI/CD: CircleCI
Backend: NestJS, Node.js (v24), TypeScript, Prisma ORM + raw SQL
Database: PostgreSQL 17, Redis (ElastiCache)
Queues: BullMQ
Data Pipelines: Airbyte, RudderStack
Chat: GetStream (Stream.io)
Analytics: Amplitude, AppsFlyer
Payments: Stripe, Apple IAP
WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS
Equals is scaling fast and the infrastructure needs to keep up. You'll be the person the team relies on to keep the platform healthy as we grow. When traffic spikes, you scale it. When something breaks, you fix it. When we need to ingest a billion rows of music catalog data, you make sure the database doesn't run out of storage. You'll have full autonomy over infrastructure decisions and a direct impact on every user's experience.
COMPENSATION
Competitive salary (£90k+) and equity package (£100k+)
PERKS
* Laptop and other necessary equipment provided
* Office lunch on the house when you visit
* Regular socials with the team
* Private health insurance