Cloud Engineer

About bol.com

Bol.com is the largest online retailer in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Position

How do you make our customers happy?

Bol.com is changing retail to make daily life simpler for 12 million customers. Together with 47000 partners who do business on our retail tech platform, we offer roughly 34 million articles and achieve peak sales of 700 orders per minute (Black Friday 2020). As those numbers indicate, huge amounts of data flow through our infrastructure. Think transactional, product-related, inspirational, financial, et cetera. To ensure this data flows unimpeded, we continually invest in optimizing and innovating our infrastructure. In our data centers. And in the cloud. Can you assume ownership over the latter and help us reach cloud 9?

What you get

Working at bol.com is challenging and therefore you get something in return. Besides salary, you will also get:

• A yearly bonus
• The opportunity to work broad
• A flexible work culture
• Holiday allowance
• Holiday entitlement of 29 days
• Travel allowance
• A place where you can be 100% you
• Group insurance and more!

We warmly welcome our new colleagues, so they feel home as soon as possible. During your onboarding program, we give you all the ins and outs about bol.com! 

Your responsibilities

As Cloud Engineer, you join a team of true Kubernetes believers and veracious Kubernetes advocates. As for results: we have many thousands of pods running on multiple GKE clusters.

At bol.com we subscribe to autonomy and self-service, so our feature teams provision GCP projects and Kubernetes namespaces themselves. All of our cloud teams use an in-house built provisioning system developed on top of Puppet, Terraform and Kubectl. Access to alpha/private GCP features allows us to stay ahead of the curve. Last year we integrated and rolled out Istio in our GKE clusters. And we are in the process of integrating Istio into our data centers as well, so we can create one big service mesh. But we’re not there yet; there is lots more to improve before our platform is the best it can be, and we look to you for inspiration!

It’s up to you and your team to run the cloud and data center infrastructure. That includes developing new features and making sure existing features stay available, secure and cost-effective. Together with two other teams, we form a group focused on provisioning. That group is, in turn, part of the Space that manages our overall technical platform. At our scale, it makes sense to offer our 100+ product teams a dedicated platform, so they can focus on building awesome software without having to worry (too much) about infrastructural considerations.

Job specs

• Keep the cloud infrastructure up and running. Smoothly. And continually 
• Develop and implement valuable new features whilst safeguarding existing ones
• Team up with colleagues who zoom in on data center infrastructure solutions, so dependencies are managed effectively, and strategies remain aligned
• Manage multiple GKE clusters that run a combined total of thousands of pods
• Help integrate Istio into our data centers, so that we can create a unified service mesh

Why you can make a difference

Because you bring the whole package: cloud engineering (we use GCP), Kubernetes, Terraform, VPC networking, containers, Puppet and Linux experience. If you are also familiar with Redhat/Linux system engineering, even better! Development skills and adaptability are a must. As is (basic) knowledge of networking, HTTP and the inner workings of the internet in general. But hey, that’s more or less a given.

3 reasons why this is (not) for you

• Yes, if you want to be an active member of a seasoned and skilled engineering team that covers a lot of ground fast
• Yes, if you can represent your team (and its customer-centric philosophy) company-wide
• Yes, if you love to make things better and welcome different viewpoints: the more opinions, the better the decisions
• No, if you prefer ‘tried and true’ solutions to venturing into new territory #ihatechange
• No, if you flat-out refuse to be part of a standby team, despite the compensation
• No, if you are a lone wolf – sharing is for sheep

Where you'll work

At the premier online retail tech platform in the Netherlands and Belgium. A platform where 12 million Dutch and Belgian customers can choose from over 30 million articles. A platform that helps roughly 47000 commercial partners run their businesses. And a platform that will never be ‘finished’, because bol.com has been reinventing retail since 1999 and always will be. If there’s a better way to do something, we’re working on it! Together with our customers, partners, and over 2500 colleagues. As Cloud Engineer, you’re on our Network team, a proud member of the Provisioning fleet, and responsible for the availability, performance and security of our core systems. Zoom out and you’ll find yourself in the technical platform space, the tectonic plate you inhabit in the overall bol.com IT universe. You have 9 direct colleagues and interact with people at all levels, and from a wide range of (tech and non-tech) backgrounds.

Additional details

About bol.com

For over 13 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium, bol.com is their go-to online shop. On our platform, they can find over 34 million products. These items are not just offered by bol.com but primarily by our 47,000 partners: entrepreneurs who work together with bol.com to reach their customers. Together we aim to create the best online retail tech platform for our customers and partners, giving them a personal and inspiring experience. To achieve that goal we research, innovate, experiment and build. Every day.

To our customers, bol.com might seem just a website, an app and a parcel on their doormat. But at the scale we operate, you may already be imagining: it is much more. It’s about hundreds of different applications, each providing a clear capability. Together they form our tech retail platform. Tech impacts the whole process, from assets on the virtual shelves to items in the shopping baskets, from products in the warehouse to parcels at the front door. Altogether we run millions of lines of code in a modern microservices architecture, all created by our tech professionals. Furthermore, we do not just write code, we also experiment. We research data, and together with other disciplines we are continuously discovering ways to improve our products.