Platform Operations Engineer

Platform Operations Engineer

We’re looking for an incredible operations engineer who can help us to develop the platform for our world-class product for modern charities.

At Beacon we’re a growing technology startup building the best nonprofit-focused CRM in the world. We passionately believe in the power of technology to make a difference.

Chris and David, both software engineers, founded Beacon in 2017 to build a new kind of charity CRM using the latest technology and design principles.

Now over 1600 innovative charities around the world trust Beacon to run their core technology infrastructure. Animal welfare, human rights, disaster relief, cancer support – all powered by Beacon. You can see a quick demo of our product, here.

We have doing good at the core of our mission, but we’re also profitable, privately owned, and our goals are for long term sustainable growth – not making a quick buck for venture capitalists.

At Beacon we take building exceptional software very seriously. In a recent survey by Fundraising magazine we were rated 4.7/5 on functionality and 4.8/5 on ease of use – we want to keep it that way!

Our technology stack is built around Serverless architectures running on AWS and GCP. We use a combination of Lambdas and Google Cloud Run both running Node to power our backend. All new services are written using TypeScript, and we’re big advocates of modern AI workflows. We use a range of data stores in the backend, choosing the right tools for the job where relevant. These include Postgres, Google Spanner and BigQuery. We’re continually refining and optimising our databases for scalability and performance.

Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Management: Perform updates to our AWS and GCP infrastructure via a pragmatic combination of ClickOps and Terraform configuration.
• Security & Compliance: Action all security remediation actions coming from Vanta to ensure we maintain the high standards required for ISO27001.
• Access Control: Manage and action all GCP/AWS permissions and access requests coming in via Beacon security.
• Monitoring & Incident Response: Respond to infrastructure alerts relating to capacity or systems issues. Work with the platform team to configure AWS and GCP monitoring (alerts, performance dashboards, logs) and contribute to the team’s strategy for responding when things go wrong.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience in a DevOps, Cloud Engineering, or Systems Administration role, preferably within a B2B SaaS environment is absolutely essential.
• Solid Cloud Fundamentals: Confident hands-on experience with AWS core services (including RDS, Lambda, and CloudWatch) and with GCP (specifically Google BigQuery).
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), specifically Terraform, alongside a willingness to balance it with ClickOps where practical.
• Meticulous attention to detail. You’ll be handling security compliance and user permissions where accuracy is vital.
• Absolutely superb communication skills. You need to be able to communicate effectively across Beacon’s engineering team, working closely with other engineers to solve challenging problems and optimise processes.

Bonus points

• Experience with using GitHub Actions to set up continuous integration environments.
• Experience with approaches for managing and scaling large SQL databases.
• An eager, proactive approach to learning. You are excited to be mentored, take direction, and grow your skills within the team.
• Familiarity with the ISO27001 security standard and how it relates to infrastructure.
• Familiarity with Google Spanner.

Benefits

• Our customers are all charities – you’ll get to build your career whilst having a genuinely positive impact on the world
• Four day work week. Our working model gives everyone a 3 day weekend, every week.
• We’ll give you 6 weeks (24 days) of holiday every year, plus bank holidays
• 6 week fully paid sabbatical every 5 years
• Taking time off is important. And we really mean it: We’ll pay you a £60 bonus for every day of holiday you take
• Banded salary system so that everyone is paid the same for doing the same job, and compensation growth within the organisation is clear.
• Guaranteed pay rise to adjust for inflation every 12 months
• EMI-qualifying share options – you get to own a piece of the company
• Beacon is climate positive (beyond carbon neutral), so your employment won’t hurt the planet. Learn more
• A proper pension – we’ll match 150% of your pension contributions (up to 10%)
• Private health insurance with routine dental & optical cover
• Modern parental leave policy (12 weeks at full pay, and it’s the same for everyone, regardless of gender or circumstances)
• Cycle to work scheme

Working together

As a team we prefer to be together in our office (4-6 New Inn Broadway, London, EC2A 3PR) and we’d want you to join us – so this is not a remote role. We offer flexible working hours and while your usual place of work will be with us in the office, you can work home when you need to.

We passionately believe in doing our part to address the tech sector’s diversity problem

We believe that in building diversity we build strength.

We encourage everyone with the required skills to apply, we consider building a diverse and representative team to be critical to our success, and we actively pursue building a more diverse team.

We have a banded salary system to ensure that nobody is paid differently for the same role. Salaries across the organisation, including executive pay, are entirely transparent.

Our parental leave policy provides for 12 weeks of full pay, and can be taken by any parent, regardless of their new parenting circumstances.