Bare-Metal Platform Engineer
About audienzz
Audienzz is a Swiss digital advertising company developing and operating technology for publishers, advertisers and media partners. Audienzz is part of the NZZ group and operates independently, with its own technology decisions.
Our engineering organisation runs a highly automated infrastructure platform based on Linux, Kubernetes, Ceph and Bazel. The platform runs more than 200 stateful and stateless services on self-managed bare-metal infrastructure.
We operate the underlying infrastructure ourselves and are looking for an experienced Platform Engineer to strengthen our platform team.
What we offer:
- A technically challenging role with substantial ownership of a sophisticated production infrastructure and build platform.
- Direct influence on platform architecture and technology decisions, with short decision paths.
- Close collaboration with experienced software and platform engineers across the full infrastructure stack.
- An engineering culture focused on reliability, automation and continuous improvement.
Practical details:
Location: Preferably Zurich. Remote work from elsewhere in Europe is possible for the right candidate; regular presence in Zurich is required.
On-call: Production alerts are routed to a Slack channel and handled by the platform team. There is currently no formal on-call rota; defining a sustainable on-call model as the team grows is part of this role.
Interested?
Send us your CV together with a few sentences about the most challenging infrastructure environment or problem you have owned end to end, including where you have operated self-managed Kubernetes and Ceph, and at what scale.
Subject: Bare-Metal Platform Engineer
Audienzz AG welcomes applications from candidates with different backgrounds and experiences. If you meet most of the requirements but not every individual point, we still encourage you to apply.
Requirements
- Several years of hands-on experience operating self-managed Kubernetes in production (kubespray, kubeadm or comparable)
- Practical production experience with Ceph, including RBD, CephFS and/or object storage
- Strong Linux system administration and troubleshooting skills
- Experience with Helm and infrastructure-as-code or GitOps workflows, including Ansible
- Solid networking knowledge (routing, DNS, TLS, load balancing) and CI/CD build infrastructure
Responsibilities
Your role & responsibilities:
As a Bare-Metal Platform Engineer, you will take end-to-end responsibility for the infrastructure and build platform on which our applications and data systems run, working closely with the engineers who built and operate it today.
The role spans Linux, Kubernetes, Ceph, networking, automation, CI/CD and our Bazel-based build system. It is a hands-on engineering position for someone who enjoys understanding complex systems from the operating system and network layer through to build, deployment and production operations.
Audienzz has around 80 people on the business side and an engineering team of around 40, with a small core of employees in Zurich and long-term external engineers across several European locations. Working language in engineering is English.
- Take end-to-end responsibility for the infrastructure and build platform on which our applications and data systems run.
- Operate and further develop our Kubernetes infrastructure, including node lifecycle, upgrades, capacity planning and production troubleshooting.
- Provision and manage our bare-metal Linux infrastructure using Ansible and automation.
- Operate and evolve our self-managed Ceph storage platform.
- Own and maintain our Bazel-based build system for more than 200 services, including custom Starlark tooling, remote caching and remote execution.
- Develop and maintain our Helm-based deployment tooling and GitLab CI/CD infrastructure.
- Operate and improve networking, load balancing, DNS, TLS and ingress infrastructure.
- Ensure the reliability of stateful and stateless workloads through observability, backup and recovery, performance analysis and incident troubleshooting. About the
Team & Setup:
- Engineering team of around 40 people, with a small core in Zurich and long-term external engineers across several European locations.
- Working language in engineering is English.
- Highly automated platform running more than 200 stateful and stateless services on self-managed bare-metal infrastructure.