Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
GRNET S.A., Greece
Job Description
GRNET National Infrastructures for Research and Technology, provides networking and cloud computing services to academic and research institutions, to educational bodies at all levels, and to agencies of the public, broader public and private sector. It is responsible for promoting and disseminating network and computing technologies and applications, as well as implementing Greece’s Digital Transformation goals. Thus, GRNET leverages the educational and research activity in the country, towards the development of applied and technological research in the fields of telecommunication networks and computing services.
GRNET develops synergies with other agencies which provide digital services in the Greek public sector, by sharing best practices and know-how on advanced information systems and it represents the national research and technological community within the European Union’s Research Infrastructures. GRNET contributes to the country’s Digital Transformation via in-depth analysis, technological studies, standard solutions and specialized know-how, serving at the same time hundreds of thousands of users on a daily basis in the strategic fields of Public Administration, Education, Research, Health and Culture.
GRNET is also the National Research and Education Network (NREN) of Greece.
GRNET has been recently involved in Digital Transformation actions, initiated by the Ministry of Digital Governance. Such actions require a whole different perspective on how we handle user needs and thus, on how we design, develop and
provide services. For this reason, we are looking for Site Reliability Engineers that will help us design, develop and run resilient, scalable and cutting-edge services based on Free and Open Source software and build a strong DevOps culture in our organization.
GRNET has a wide service portfolio, covering a number of sectors. A (non-exhaustive) list can be found below:
- gov.gr: Unified Portal for all Government-related Digital Services ( )
- Dilosi: Digital Solemn Declarations, Certificates ( , )
- COVID-19 testing and reporting: EU Digital Green Certificate, COVID Test Declarations.
- ESA Copernicus: EU’s earth observation program serving satellite observation data
- BDR: Greek Blood Donor Registry
- Zeus: Verifiable electronic elections
- ~okeanos: Public Cloud for the Academic and Research Community
- ViMa: VPS for the Academic and Research Community
GRNET hosts its infrastructure on its own Data Centers distributed across Greece, based completely on Free and Open Source software. We operate ~1500 managed hosts and over 10,000 user VMs. Our services are used by over 1,000,000 users per day, a number that is constantly growing. Considering the large scale of our infrastructure and the increasing demand for services, GRNET adopts the Site Reliability Engineering approach.
Our SRE group is separated into three teams: Services, Platform and Cloud.
As an SRE you will be assigned to one of these teams, based on current needs,
preferences and expertise. A short list of current and future projects is provided below:
- Cloud
- Design and implementation of our new Cloud infrastructure, based on OpenStack and Kubernetes.
- Lifecycle management of our bare-metal servers using an Infrastructure as Code approach: Provisioning, operations, failures.
- Design and prepare the migration of current workloads to our new Cloud infrastructure.
- Platform
- Provide new features to our internal deployment Platform, such as: Object Storage (S3 APIs), SSO, Static Site Hosting.
- Improve monitoring and alerting using an SLO-based approach.
- Harden and secure Kubernetes clusters.
- Scale Kubernetes and PostgreSQL clusters.
- Services
- Build tooling to spawn ephemeral environments for development and testing purposes.
- Migrate services to Kubernetes, in collaboration with our development teams.
- Harden workloads together with our Security team: container image hardening, Kubernetes workload isolation and more.
We almost exclusively make use of Free and Open Source Software. Among others, our tech stack consists of the following tools:
- Containers: Kubernetes, Docker
- CI/CD: GitLab CI, ArgoCD
- Development languages: Python, Go
- OS: Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux
- Databases: PostgreSQL
- Monitoring: Prometheus, Elastic Stack
- Orchestration and CM: Ansible, Puppet
- Cloud: OpenStack, Google Ganeti
- Storage: