DevOps Engineer
Summary
Own and harden a bare-metal Docker Swarm stack powering an AI research-discovery SaaS; automate PostgreSQL upgrades, Vespa HA, and end-to-end certificate rotation while keeping ISO 27001 compliance evidence current.
We build AI-powered SaaS tools that understand, discover, and recommend scientific papers and experts. For the past 10 years, we've helped businesses and academic institutions stay at the cutting edge of research. We have more than 60 clients, including Europe's largest scientific funding agencies, top-10 scientific publishers and universities.
We've been practicing true Development Operations for many years (developers do their own operations). We are certified with ISO 27001, and we're looking for a specialist to own our infrastructure and take reliability and security further than we can on our own. You will work directly with the CTO and 6 developers.
Projects waiting for you:
PostgreSQL major upgrade (to 18) with minimal downtime, failover automation (repmgr + HAProxy)
Vespa high availability and rolling updates
Secrets management done right: restructuring our Vault, secret rotation, possibly dynamic secrets
End-to-end certificate automation (ACME / Vault / vault-agent / Traefik) with alerting before anything expires
Log storage that scales: Elasticsearch index lifecycle management, shard control, resilient log pipeline
Incident response practice: runbooks, escalation, post-mortems, tabletop exercises
Plus the ongoing work: monitoring and alerting that stays actionable (Prometheus/Grafana), OS and package updates with proper maintenance windows, keeping our security compliance evidence cheap to maintain.
Our stack:
Bare-metal servers with Docker Swarm orchestration (deliberately boring)
PostgreSQL (non-containerized)
Ansible for configuration management
CircleCI for continuous integration
ELK stack and Prometheus for monitoring
Monolithic Python application
Vespa search engine
You’ll be great for this role if you:
Are passionate about infrastructure reliability
Have worked with bare-metal deployments and know what HA means when no cloud provider does it for you
Love documenting complex systems and processes
Can balance security requirements with operational efficiency
Ideal technical background:
Strong Linux systems administration skills
Experience with container orchestration
Infrastructure-as-code habits
Understanding of security best practices; ISO 27001 / SOC 2 audit experience is a plus, not a requirement
Familiarity with monitoring and logging systems
European working hours or a sufficient overlap with them. No on-call. We're open to an experienced part-time person, and equally open to a strong back-end developer who wants to seriously own operations.
Join us in making our infrastructure more resilient and audit-ready while supporting the global research community!