Staff DevOps Engineer

Are you looking for a cutting-edge tech stack to work with daily? We are currently expanding our Infrastructure team and are looking for a new colleague to join as a Staff DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer. You can work from home or one of our Central Europe offices (Bratislava, Brno, Prague) on a full-time basis. The base salary range for this position is 1 520 000 - 1 900 000 CZK. The pay range actually offered will take into account a variety of potential factors considered in compensation, including but not limited to skills, qualifications, geographic location, accomplishments, experience, credentials, internal equity and business needs, and may vary from the range listed above. Are you ready to grow with us?

What tech stack do we have for you?

• Kubernetes (GKE), Terraform, GitLab
• Google Cloud, including a wide range of managed products such as Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Bigtable, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub
• Self-hosted stack: MongoDB, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Etcd, Victoria Metrics, InfluxDB, Sentry
• Python, Golang

Minimum requirements:

At least 5 years of production experience with:

• Kubernetes - we are looking for an engineer who not only deploys applications to a cluster, but also understands what is happening behind the scenes and can operate 24x7 production
• GCP (preferred)/AWS/Azure - our solution is built on top of the GCP platform. Candidate should be comfortable working with public cloud, understand the risks and benefits associated with running applications in the public cloud, be familiar with infrastructure as a code principle, and have the ability to make design choices between using cloud-managed solutions versus self-hosted alternatives
• Python/Go - you should be able to read and understand code with confidence, and to review and evaluate AI-generated Python code for correctness, security, and fit. Hands-on coding skills matter less than before, but you should still be able to develop custom tooling when needed, with or without AI assistance

If you don’t meet these requirements, don’t worry; take a look at the Senior DevOps position - Czechia: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/bloomreach/jobs/8329244, Slovakia: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/bloomreach/jobs/8329243

How to know if you are a good fit:

The qualifications outlined below serve as a guide to determine if your skills and experience align with the requirements of this position:

• Design and Specification: You turn loosely defined problems into designs and specifications that others can execute. You write design proposals, weigh trade-offs between managed and self-hosted solutions, and review the designs of others.
• Cross-team Leadership: You have led projects spanning multiple teams, from scoping and planning through delivery, coordinating engineers who do not report to you.
• Independent Delivery: You take a specified maintenance or project task and drive it to completion on your own. AI assistants are a given part of your toolkit, but you always understand and can explain how and why every change was made.
• AI as a Tool, Not a Replacement: You use AI assistants to work faster, not to hand your work over. You understand what the AI produced, question and verify it, and steer it toward the outcome you want rather than accepting whatever it gives you. You stay in control and remain accountable for everything you ship.
• Continuous Learning: You have a keen interest in Kubernetes and related technologies, as demonstrated by your active engagement in reading and staying up to date on them.
• Conference Participation: You have participated in DevOps-related conferences, showcasing your commitment to continuous learning and networking in the field.
• Configuration Proficiency: You have hands-on experience configuring pod/container security context, network policies, roles and role bindings, pod affinity, host path, pod disruption budgets, priority classes, node taints, to name a few.
• Resource Optimization: You have analyzed resource usage of applications hosted on a cluster and implemented or suggested changes to resource requests/limits, Horizontal Pod Autoscalers (HPAs), or Vertical Pod Autoscalers (VPAs).
• Cluster Management: You have a deep understanding of the clusters you manage, including the types of machines used in node pools, the reasons for their selection, which cluster features are enabled or disabled, the cluster version, and the node autoscaling configuration. You have successfully upgraded the Kubernetes cluster versions without interrupting live applications hosted on the cluster.
• Terraform Proficiency: You have written a Terraform module with multiple interconnected resources.
• Monitoring and Alerting: You have experience setting up monitoring systems and configuring alerts. On-duty experience is preferred, along with experience with Grafana and Prometheus.
• DevOps and CI/CD Experience: You have experience with DevOps, Orchestration/Configuration Management, and Continuous Integration technologies, including Terraform, GitLab, Ansible, and Docker.
• Team Onboarding and Training: You have experience with onboarding and training new team members, demonstrating your leadership skills and commitment to team growth.

About your team:

The Infrastructure team operates and maintains Bloomreach Engagement core infrastructure built on Google Cloud with security, high availability, costs, and scalability in mind. Our vision is to identify and implement opportunities to achieve a robust, reliable, and efficient infrastructure and development platform. We strongly support DevOps culture: each team is responsible for releasing, operating, and monitoring their own applications.

The role of the Infrastructure Team is to provide a strong foundation upon which all teams can build, for example, manage big infrastructure components like Kubernetes, databases, and cloud components in Google Cloud. An important role of the team is also to provide support to developers, review design proposals, validate the performance and availability of applications, and sometimes even develop new core application components such as logging or authorization.

Tasks and responsibilities:

In the position of Staff DevOps Engineer, you’d be expected to work with other Engineering teams to design sustainable infrastructure, microservice solutions, and an efficient and robust production environment. Additionally, you’ll be working on a variety of tasks and projects, including automating tools and infrastructure to reduce manual work, monitoring applications and participating in an on-call rotation as required.

You’ll own the design and specification of infrastructure initiatives, break them down into tasks the team can execute, and lead projects that span multiple engineering teams. AI assistants are a given part of your toolkit, and you retain full understanding of, and responsibility for, what gets shipped.

The ideal candidate will be passionate about learning new things, creative, willing to take the initiative, and able to think outside the box to solve problems strategically.

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