Release Automation Engineer

As stewards of the Polkadot and Substrate ecosystem, Parity is laying the foundation for a better web that respects the freedom and data of individuals and empowers developers to create better services through decentralized technology. The internet is too important to billions of people for it to be at the mercy of a few powerful companies.

Like Polkadot, Parity was built on a foundation of being decentralised and open, which trickles down to how we work. We’re a distributed organisation and have been from the beginning. Being distributed isn’t just a way of doing business—it’s a mentality that is at the core of our culture. We have a flat structure that pushes power to the edges and empowers our people to take ownership of their role, authority coupled with responsibilities.

Parity is looking for an industrious Release Automation Engineer to help us stay on top of that rather extensive release roadmap by furthering the automation of our release engineering processes.

About the team:

Release Engineering at Parity is a small team of cooperative yet somewhat autonomous engineers. Within the company, we work on streamlining and optimizing the release process for several projects by creating release tooling, automation, and - of course - regular releases. Many of our contributions are in private parity repositories, but public work can be reviewed at https://github.com/paritytech/releng-scripts.

About the position:

You will be working on and designing automation tooling responsible for interacting with crates.io, S3, GitHub, GitLab and the likes, streamlining the process of versioning, synchronising, and publishing the many subcrates in Parity’s Polkadot and Substrate projects. Bits and pieces of this have already been written, and proposals drafted, but with excellent documentation you should feel right at home helping us push this to the finish line and spearhead new improvements.

About you:

• You have a prior exposure to any reasonable build system (ideally this would be cargo, since we’re a Rust shop — but make will do).
• You are fluent in bash — but bonus points if your weapon of choice is some other, more sane scripting language.
• You are familiar with desktop software packaging — ideally finding certain comfort in maintaining old-school deb and rpm repos in the modern world of red-green deployments and html5-based webapps.
• You have experience interacting with GitHub Actions, GitLab runner pipelines, and S3.
• You have seen enough Linux internals to reason about choice of the libc version to link our software with.
• You can figure out how to build software for Mac and Windows if necessary.
• You can show us some advanced GPG trickery. (Yes, GPG is considered harmful. But it’s inevitable evil when it comes to release signing; you *will* be exposed. Let’s say it’s an occupational hazard.)
• You know how to Docker/Podman your way around.
• You are able to maintain security of our build systems and supply chains, knowing that there are threats out there who are advanced, persistent and are after us in particular.
• You are the kind of person who finds The Checklist Manifesto book by Atul Gawande really inspiring.
• You enjoy good documentation, and writing/maintaining such.

About working for us:

For everyone who joins us:

• Competitive remuneration packages, including tokens (where legally possible), based on iterative market research
• Remote-first, global working environment with flexible hours
• Collaborative, fast-paced, and self-initiating culture, designed to mimic an open source workflow
• Energising and collaborative team and company retreats all over the world
• Opportunity to learn more about Web3 while on the job, with access to some of the brightest minds in this space; we have plenty of educational initiatives such as internal sessions, all-hands, AMAs, hackathons, etc.
• Teammates who are genuinely excited about their job, impact, and Parity’s mission
• Opportunity to relocate to Germany or Portugal

For those joining us as employees in Germany, Portugal, or the U.K.:

• 28 paid vacation days per year
• Work laptop (macOS or Linux-based) and equipment to enable you to work successfully

• £2,500 yearly learning and development budget for conferences or courses of your choice