Principal DevOps Engineer

* The role

We are looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer to take responsibility for the infrastructure Octostar runs on: cloud and on-premise hosting, Kubernetes clusters, the release pipeline and the air-gapped installer. The role covers design, implementation, day-to-day operation and documentation.

This is an individual contributor role. You will report to the CTO and work alongside the DevOps team and senior engineers. The work is mostly hands-on engineering.

* Responsibilities

• **Environments.** Provision and maintain all environments, from CI to production, as infrastructure-as-code.
• **Kubernetes.** Design, deploy and operate the Kubernetes clusters, in the cloud and on-premise.
• **Air-gapped delivery.** Build and maintain the offline installer. Customers install with no internet access, so every image, chart and dependency normally downloaded at install time must be included.
• **CI/CD and developer workflow.** Maintain the build and release pipelines and the local development setup, and keep them consistent with the deployed environments.
• **Network security.** Operate private networks with allow-listed egress and monitor outbound traffic.
• **Observability.** Maintain the monitoring, logging, tracing and alerting systems.
• **Cost.** Track infrastructure spend and size resources, including GPU capacity, based on measured usage.
• **AI infrastructure.** Deploy and operate model endpoints and inference serving.
• **Customer installations.** Communicate with customers during installations and upgrades.
• **Documentation.** Maintain architecture documents, a decision log and runbooks.

* Requirements

• Extensive experience designing, deploying and operating production Kubernetes clusters, in the cloud and on-premise.
• A track record of owning infrastructure from design through to production operation.
• In-depth knowledge of Linux administration and networking.
• Experience managing infrastructure as code and building CI/CD pipelines.
• Proficiency in scripting (Bash, Python or similar).
• Experience troubleshooting production Linux systems and running a self-hosted observability stack (Prometheus, Loki or similar).
• The ability to write clear technical documentation.
• Excellent written and spoken English.
• Experience supporting customer IT teams during on-premise installations and upgrades.

* Nice to have

• Experience delivering software to air-gapped environments.
• Knowledge of RKE2/K3s.
• Operational knowledge of Postgres, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Temporal and S3-compatible object storage.
• Familiarity with LLM and model serving (vLLM, Ray Serve or similar).

* What we offer

• Competitive salary and equity, commensurate with experience.
• 20 days of annual leave.
• Flexible working arrangements.

* Practicalities

• **Contract:** Full-time.
• **Location:** Ireland or Italy. Offices in Galway and Bergamo; remote or hybrid depending on where you are.
• **Process:** An introductory call, followed by a technical interview.