Principal DevOps Engineer

About the Role

Join a rapidly expanding, venture-backed software company dedicated to creating an AI-powered data analytics platform. Serving clients in government, security, and financial sectors, this platform operates across cloud, on-premise, and securely isolated air-gapped environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and manage all environments using infrastructure-as-code methodologies, spanning from continuous integration to production deployments.
• Architect and maintain Kubernetes clusters deployed both in cloud and on-premises settings.
• Create and support an offline installer tailored for customers requiring air-gapped deployment solutions.
• Oversee continuous integration and continuous delivery workflows ensuring local developer setups align closely with production environments.
• Administer secure private networks with tightly controlled outbound data flow.
• Manage internal observability tools, including monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems.
• Deploy and maintain AI model endpoints and inference serving, including planning for GPU resource allocation.
• Collaborate with client IT teams during software installation and upgrade processes.
• Maintain up-to-date architectural documentation, decision logs, and operational runbooks.

Candidate Profile

• Proven extensive experience managing production-grade Kubernetes infrastructure in both cloud and on-premise environments.
• Demonstrated ownership and accountability for complete infrastructure lifecycle management.
• Strong expertise in Linux systems administration, networking, and issue resolution.
• Solid background in infrastructure-as-code tools and CI/CD pipeline development.
• Proficiency in scripting languages such as Bash or Python to automate and manage systems.
• Experience with self-hosted observability platforms like Prometheus, Loki, or equivalents.
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written, with clear technical documentation capability.
• Track record of working directly with customer IT departments, particularly for on-premises installations.

Additional Desirable Skills

• Hands-on experience deploying applications within fully air-gapped environments.
• Familiarity with lightweight Kubernetes distributions, including RKE2 and K3s.
• Knowledge of databases and storage systems such as Postgres, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Temporal, and S3-compatible solutions.
• Experience with large language model (LLM) deployment and serving platforms like vLLM or Ray Serve.

Work Setup and Reporting

This individual contributor role involves close collaboration with the CTO and a small DevOps team. The position is primarily remote with occasional presence (1-2 days monthly) at the Galway office.