DevOps Engineer (Mid / Senior)

Abaro is hiring a hands-on DevOps Engineer to keep a 24/7 production telemetry platform running — someone who takes a problem and brings it to the end without supervision.

About the role

You'll join a small infrastructure team responsible for the Open Telemetry Platform - multiple production Kubernetes clusters and everything under them — bare metal, Proxmox, networking, VPN tunnels to our customers, databases, and monitoring. The platform runs 24/7, and you'll be part of the paid on-call rotation. You get an area of responsibility, not a step-by-step plan. We expect you to find the root cause, fix it, verify it, write it down, and report back with facts.

How we work

Please read this before applying — it matters more to us than any single technology.

• Autonomy is the default. You figure things out from the code, docs, logs, and the system itself. Ask when you're genuinely blocked or the decision isn't yours.

• Done means done. Deployed, verified in production, committed to Git, documented in the ticket. Not "should work".

• Honesty over appearances. Broke something or don't know something? Say it right away. Mistakes are fine; hiding them isn't.

• Small, targeted changes. Fix what's broken without rebuilding the surroundings. Bigger changes: propose them with arguments, then build what was agreed.

• Production discipline. Changes are announced, planned, and have a rollback path.

• No drama. No politics, no blame, no meetings for the sake of meetings. Short written status updates.

• Disagree, then commit. Challenge decisions with data; once decided, deliver.

• Clear role. Platform direction and architecture are set by the Head of Infrastructure.

  This is a hands-on role with real ownership of execution — not a management role and

  not a path to a separate team or a parallel stack.

What we expect

• Kubernetes in production — cluster lifecycle (incl. k3s), networking (CNI, Ingress, MetalLB), RBAC, storage, scheduling and performance troubleshooting

• Networking fundamentals — TCP/IP, DNS, routing, NAT, load balancing; site-to-site VPNs (IPsec, GRE over IPsec); firewalls (pfSense, nftables, firewalld); tcpdump and Wireshark

• Linux administration in production (RHEL/Rocky, Debian/Ubuntu)

• Observability — correlating logs, metrics (Prometheus, Grafana) and traces to find root causes across distributed systems

• Infrastructure as Code — Ansible at minimum; Terraform or Pulumi a plus

• CI/CD and GitOps — Jenkins, ArgoCD, Helm

• Virtualization — Proxmox VE/KVM, Docker; VMware and GCP a plus

• JVM stacks (Java/Scala) — enough to troubleshoot GC, heap and resource issues

• Data layer, operationally — Cassandra, MariaDB (replication, failover, HA), Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, Hazelcast

• AI tools in daily work — Claude Code, Copilot or similar, with everything they produce verified

• Incidents you owned end-to-end — you can tell us what happened, what you did, what you got wrong and what you changed after

• Clear written and spoken communication in Polish and English

Mid: solid in most of the above, deep in a few; handles typical incidents alone and knows when to escalate. Senior: deep in most; can take a serious incident alone at 3 AM and deliver a post-mortem the next day.

Nice to have

• Advanced Kubernetes networking (Calico, Cilium) or a service mesh

• Security and hardening — Falco, Network Policies, FreeIPA, Wazuh, vulnerability management

• Bare-metal hardware (Dell iDRAC, RAID), MikroTik, Tailscale

• Performance tuning of JVM apps, Cassandra or Kafka

• Runbooks and post-mortems that other people actually use

What you'll do

• Run and evolve Kubernetes clusters — upgrades, scaling, networking, security

• Resolve incidents across the full stack: network, JVM, Kafka, MariaDB, Cassandra

• Keep observability useful — dashboards, and alerts worth waking up for

• Automate toil — if you do it twice, automate it

• Maintain CI/CD and GitOps (Jenkins, ArgoCD)

• Patch and mitigate vulnerabilities across the fleet

• Take part in on-call and incident response

• Document what you do — tickets, runbooks, post-mortems

• Propose improvements backed by data and deliver the agreed ones end-to-end

Probably not a match if you

• need daily guidance or a detailed task breakdown to make progress

• report work as finished before verifying it

• want to rewrite the platform in your favourite tools in the first month

• prefer process and meetings to fixing things

• are looking for a management or architect-of-everything role

What we offer

• Small team, flat structure, real ownership

• Paid on-call

• Training budget and in-house trainings

• Private healthcare and sport subscription

• Company phone

• Office with free coffee, bike parking, no dress code

Recruitment process

1. Screening call (~30 min) — your experience and expectations.

2. Technical interview (60–90 min) — Kubernetes, networking, observability, troubleshooting; scenario questions and a detailed walk-through of real incidents you handled yourself.

3. Manager interview (~45 min) — how you work: autonomy, communication, mistakes, disagreement and pressure.

Tech stack

• Kubernetes
• Networking
• Linux Administration
• Observability
• Infrastructure as code
• CI/CD
• Virtualization
• Data Layer
• Kubernetes Networking
• Security and hardening