Senior DevOps Engineer

We are a fast-moving product company building a data-intensive platform with large-scale data pipelines, machine learning inference, backend services, and analytics. Our entire infrastructure is cloud-native, lean, fully hosted in the EU, and built with scalability, security, and performance in mind. We are looking for a hands-on Senior DevOps / SRE Engineer who will take ownership of our infrastructure from end to end. Your focus will be building and maintaining a secure, scalable, observable, and cost-efficient platform. This is a highly autonomous role. We are not looking for someone who simply works through tickets. We want someone who understands the system, forms their own technical opinion, identifies opportunities for improvement, and takes initiative to implement them. Who you are You are genuinely senior and have several years of experience running production infrastructure. You make decisions based on experience and sound engineering judgment rather than trial and error. You are self-directed and have a true freelancer mindset. You take the time to understand the architecture, identify long-term risks before they become problems, and proactively suggest improvements without waiting for instructions. You work efficiently and finish what you start. You deliver reliable results instead of leaving work half completed. You communicate well, both in writing and during calls. You enjoy discussing technical topics, explaining your reasoning, and collaborating closely with the team. This role involves frequent communication and is not suited for someone who prefers working in isolation. You are comfortable challenging ideas when necessary. If you believe a technical decision is wrong, you speak up and explain your reasoning with the long-term success of the platform in mind. You care about quality. Clean repositories, proper documentation, maintainable infrastructure, and avoiding unnecessary technical debt are important to you. Required experience You have at least 5 to 7 years of full-time experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or Cloud Infrastructure Engineering. You have deep experience operating production infrastructure on Hetzner, including dedicated servers and Hetzner Cloud, or similar bare-metal and VPS environments. This includes networking, private networks, firewalls, DNS, TLS, and load balancing. Du You have experience running GPU inference workloads using and maintaining machine learning serving infrastructure with vLLM running in Docker containers. You know how to simplify and optimize multi-model deployments instead of allowing unnecessary complexity. You are highly experienced with Docker and self-managed Kubernetes environments such as k3s or bare-metal clusters. You understand when Kubernetes is the right solution and when a simpler approach is better. You are familiar with rolling, blue-green, and canary deployment strategies. You have strong Infrastructure as Code experience using Terraform across multiple environments including Development, Staging, and Production. You are also comfortable working with GitOps tools such as ArgoCD or FluxCD. You have built and maintained CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, including automated builds, testing, releases, and security scanning using tools such as Trivy, SonarQube, or similar solutions. You understand infrastructure security and secrets management using HashiCorp Vault or comparable solutions. You follow least-privilege principles, automate TLS, perform image scanning, manage software bill of materials, and actively improve the security posture of existing infrastructure. You have experience building complete observability stacks with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Tempo or Jaeger. You are familiar with SLIs, SLOs, alerting, incident response, and production monitoring. You have experience integrating managed PostgreSQL services such as Supabase, including connection pooling, performance optimization, and database migrations. You are also comfortable operating self-managed services like ClickHouse, Redis, and S3-compatible object storage with reliable backup and restore procedures. You understand GDPR requirements and EU data residency. Our infrastructure and customer data remain entirely within the European Union. You have strong Linux administration skills, are comfortable with Bash scripting, and can automate infrastructure tasks using Python. Experience with Go is a plus. You write clear documentation, maintain clean infrastructure repositories, and collaborate effectively with a fully remote engineering team of more than 20 people. Fluent English is required. German is a plus. Nice to have Experience with FinOps and infrastructure cost optimization. Experience with OpenSearch, Qdrant, or other search and vector database technologies. Experience with OpenTelemetry and modern observability without unnecessary complexity. Experience using Argo Rollouts. Experience with workflow orchestration platforms such as Airflow or Temporal for data and machine learning pipelines. Experience improving and stabilizing production systems that have grown faster than their infrastructure. How we work We are a fully remote team of more than 20 people with high technical standards and a fast development pace. We work in agile sprints with clearly defined deliverables such as Terraform modules, Kubernetes infrastructure, observability improvements, CI/CD enhancements, and GPU or machine learning platform development. Communication is an important part of the role. We combine asynchronous collaboration with regular calls, and you will work directly with the founder and our core engineering team. Our hiring process includes technical interviews only. We do not require unpaid test assignments. Before you apply Please apply only if you have genuine hands-on experience across most of these areas. Our platform is technically demanding and time-sensitive, so we are looking for someone who can take ownership from day one rather than someone who needs extensive training. If you are an experienced engineer who enjoys taking responsibility, working independently, communicating openly, and building high-quality infrastructure, we would love to hear from you.