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DevOps Engineer

Ember

Ember

Software Engineering
Edinburgh, UK
Posted on Apr 24, 2024
About Ember

We're building the future of public transport — convenient, affordable, connected and zero-emission. Our goal is to make it easier and more enjoyable to get from A to B with Ember than it is with your own car.

We’re a tech company, not a traditional bus operator. We've built a platform that coordinates our entire operation – everything from monitoring vehicles and controlling chargers to selling tickets and calculating ETAs. This allows us to use electric buses more intensively than anyone else in the world, leading to a massive emissions reduction. It also helps us provide a much better passenger experience, with innovative features like demand-responsive stops.

We’re still tiny, with two routes and 24 buses. The challenge is to scale this 100x whilst staying lean, increasing efficiency and delivering an even better product experience. We’ve recently raised equity from some of Europe’s leading climate VCs and are looking for mission-driven individuals who can help take us to the next level.

Our tech stack

Our systems drive everything we do including booking tickets, tracking buses, controlling chargers, calculating ETAs, monitoring traffic and keeping passengers informed. We rely on the following tools and technologies:

  • Python for our application code
  • React for our frontend
  • Postgres for data storage
  • Redis for caching
  • Kafka for stream processing
  • Better Uptime for alerting
  • Cloudwatch and Datadog for monitoring
  • SwiftUI for our Driver iOS App
  • AWS, Terraform, Gitlab CI/CD, Docker and ECS to deploy and run our services
  • Flutter for our on-board server running Android, which handles concession ticket validation with more on-board experience features to come.


What You Will Do

You role will be broad and could touch on any of the following or similar projects.

  • Enhancing our testing and deployment pipelines, such as adding automated load testing to validate changes before they are deployed
  • Developing a more sophisticated canary deployment strategy, with associated monitoring and rollback functionality
  • Setting up a specialised database for analytics and corresponding data pipelines
  • Improving the observability of the systems running on our buses and improving their deployment pipelines
  • Developing and maintaining our security posture
  • Contributing to application features


Your work will be making a difference to our planet by helping more people travel on zero-emission public transport.

Diversity and equality

At Ember, we support diversity across our team and customers. We work to ensure every employee feels respected and able to give their best, whether temporary, part-time or full-time. We’re happy to offer flexible working patterns where they make sense, are compassionate when it comes to time off and offer enhanced maternity and paternity leave.

Read more about our approach in our Equal Opportunities Policy.

How do I apply?

Send your CV and a cover letter telling us why you're interested in the role. If you have code from projects which you’ve worked on, please send that too.

Who We're Looking For

  • You have at least a few years of professional experience managing and deploying highly available, scalable and resilient applications and infrastructure
  • Solid experience with infrastructure-as-code (we use Terraform), Docker, automated testing and deployment
  • Solid knowledge of security best practices
  • Familiarity with the AWS ecosystem (we use ECS, MSK, RDS Postgres, and more)
  • You value simple solutions which are easy to configure and easy to maintain
  • You're conscious of human error and design configuration and workflows to be robust to such failures
  • Deep knowledge of Postgres and Kafka are a plus
  • You are excited by the idea of making an impact in a small growth company. Bus services are a real-world, tangible product where you can see the impact of changes on people’s day-to-day lives. As we scale, that impact will grow.
  • You are happy to work from our Edinburgh office at least a few days a week, because we value in-person communication. But we’re flexible if you want to work from home on some days.
  • Experience working on large scale systems within a small company is a plus.