DevOps / Network Engineer (VPN) (Remote)

Who We Are (Mode.Inc)

Mode is a fast-growing technology company building businesses at the intersection of AI, data, mobile apps, and digital experiences. Our portfolio of mobile apps and digital products reaches 100M+ monthly active users across a global audience. We continue to accelerate growth through product innovation, strategic acquisitions, and emerging business opportunities.

Mode was recognized by Deloitte as the #1 fastest-growing software company in North America on the 2023 Technology Fast 500. Today, we are building our next phase of growth, including expanding Mode's AI and data business and developing direct relationships with companies that can benefit from the data and capabilities we have built.

Our Team and Culture Drive Our Success

Our team is the heart of our culture.  We value innovation, collaboration, and curiosity, with a passion for getting things done.  We strive to hire and cultivate the best team members and foster a culture of open communication and transparency.  We are driven and hard-working but also committed to having fun along the way.  We allow OKRs to guide us, assume positive intent, sometimes agree to disagree and commit, honor our commitments, seek to accomplish more with less, and encourage everyone to speak up as our team owns our company’s success.

You can read more about our team and how we work here.

The Role

Mode.Inc is looking for a DevOps / Network Engineer to help take ownership of the infrastructure behind our newly acquired VPN product. You will work as part of a small engineering team responsible for operating, stabilizing, and evolving the product after acquisition, with the opportunity to support the infrastructure of additional acquired products over time.

You will run and evolve a globally distributed VPN network spanning multiple cloud and hosting providers, the AWS-based control plane and backend services that support it, and the infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and deployment tooling that keeps it all healthy. We are a user-facing product-led team, and we are looking for someone who is passionate about keeping a fast, private, and censorship-resistant service online for users around the world, often in regions where open internet access matters most.

As an engineer, you won't be building a greenfield platform. You'll inherit a live production environment and be responsible for understanding how it works, identifying its biggest risks, and progressively making it more reliable, automated, secure, and cost-efficient. You’ll turn “someone logs in and restarts it” into automation, build the CI/CD and observability foundations the team needs, and use agentic AI tools as a core part of your daily workflow. 

You will work closely with the Engineering Manager and backend/mobile engineers, owning the infrastructure and networking domain while partnering with the broader team on product delivery and operational reliability.

Who You Are and What You’ll Do

• You are passionate about giving people private, secure, and unrestricted access to the internet. You care about your users and the trust they place in the service.
• You have strong hands-on experience with networking and cloud infrastructure and enjoy understanding how systems work end to end.
• You have experience operating production networking infrastructure, ideally including VPN or proxy infrastructure at scale.
• You enjoy inheriting an existing environment, documenting how it actually works, and systematically replacing manual runbooks with code and automation.
• You embrace agentic AI as a force multiplier: you actively use AI coding and agentic tools to accelerate infrastructure development, investigation, documentation, and operational automation, while applying appropriate review and verification before changes reach production.
• You value working closely with Product and Engineering, learning what reliability and speed mean to users, and delivering infrastructure that they can depend on.
• You think about infrastructure as part of the product's economics: uptime, latency, connection success rate, capacity, and cost per active user all matter.
• You’re excited to deliver well-tested, version-controlled infrastructure changes in 2-week sprints, and you find minimal ways to test hypotheses and validate feasibility.
• You’re a strong advocate for CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and continuous, safe deployments with rollback paths.
• You are security-minded: secrets management, encryption at rest and in transit, least-privilege access, key handling, and compliance (GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2) are part of how you work every day.

What You Bring to the Team

Must Have:

• 5+ years of professional DevOps, SRE, or network engineering experience running production infrastructure in an agile environment, with hands-on experience using:

• AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS/PostgreSQL, Route 53, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch) plus at least one additional provider such as DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hetzner, or Linode
• Infrastructure as Code and configuration management: Terraform and Ansible
• Docker and container orchestration or fleet management for many small nodes across providers
• Linux system administration and networking: iptables/nftables, WireGuard, routing, NAT, DNS, TLS/certificates, and traffic shaping
• Observability and alerting: Datadog (or Prometheus/Grafana), Cloudflare, log aggregation, on-call and incident response
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions (or similar) with automated testing, deployment safety, and rollback
• Scripting and automation in Python, Go, or Bash
• VPN and domain expertise: Hands-on experience operating VPN, proxy, or networking infrastructure in production, with a strong understanding of server provisioning, configuration and key management, health monitoring, failover, and network performance. Experience with WireGuard, Shadowsocks, OpenVPN, or IKEv2/IPsec technologies at scale is strongly preferred.
• Deep understanding of DNS and domain management, CDN/edge (Cloudflare), IP reputation, geo-distribution, and strategies for resilience against blocking and provider outages.
• Security fundamentals: secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or SSM), encryption in transit and at rest, least-privilege IAM, vulnerability scanning, and hardening of public-facing servers.
• Agentic AI proficiency: demonstrated day-to-day use of AI agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot agents) to write and review infrastructure code, automate runbooks, and investigate incidents, with strong judgment on verifying AI-generated output before it touches production.
• You are comfortable owning production operations, including troubleshooting incidents, participating in on-call (24/7) support, identifying root causes, and improving systems so that recurring operational problems become automated rather than manual.
• You’re a candid and empathetic communicator that is excited to join a startup that enjoys leveling up a company.
• You have exceptional organizational and analytical skills leading to confident independent delivery, but know when and how to include others.
• You have experience operating production systems at a meaningful scale, with strong ownership and problem-solving skills.
• Passionate about Technology and keeping up to date with latest advancements, techniques and best practices.
• Alignment with our Core Values:
  • Accountable: You take ownership of your responsibilities, demonstrating trustworthiness and self-discipline. You are consistent in your work, transparent in your actions, and communicate effectively. You follow through on commitments and strive for continuous improvement.
  • Action-driven: Identify what is most important, agree on scope, timely execute, and drive the greatest impact.  You take initiative, roll up your sleeves, and get things done.
  • Caring: You genuinely care about yourself and others, our business and craft, our mission and vision, and are passionate in heart and mind. You understand the importance of our team and strive to create a positive, supportive work environment.
  • Curious: You focus on the ‘why,’ learn and expand your knowledge, explore new ideas, and generally make things better.  You're a lifelong learner with a thirst for knowledge and a constant desire to improve.
  • Thorough: Your work is thoughtful, impactful, timely, accurate, and complete.  You pay attention to detail, are meticulous, and ensure quality work and compliance.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with censorship-circumvention technologies and traffic obfuscation (Shadowsocks plugins, V2Ray/Xray, obfs4, domain fronting) and operating in restrictive network environments
• Experience with userspace network stacks (lwIP, gVisor netstack) or Go-based networking tooling (wireguard-go)
• (Strong Plus) Experience taking over or integrating infrastructure from another company, including unfamiliar cloud environments, accounts, vendors, monitoring, CI/CD, and operational processes.
• Kubernetes, Nomad, or similar orchestration; Packer for image building
• Self-managed databases (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis) and backup / disaster recovery design
• Cloud cost optimization across multiple providers and FinOps practices
• Compliance program experience (SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA) and handling of law-enforcement / data requests for a privacy product
• Familiarity with mobile app release pipelines (Fastlane, Bitrise, Xcode Cloud) and backend stacks in Go, Python, and Node.js

What Success Looks Like

First 30-60 days:

• Understand acquired VPN product network architecture and infrastructure.
• Build a clear map of cloud/hosting providers, VPN nodes, control plane, dependencies and operational tooling.
• Identify critical reliability, security and cost risks.
• Close critical knowledge gaps from the acquired team.
• Establish ownership and operational runbooks.
• Assure 100% product uptime.

Within 90-180 days:

• Reduce manual operational work through automation.
• Improve monitoring, alerting and incident response.
• Establish reliable CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code practices where missing.
• Improve VPN availability, connection success and operational efficiency.
• Become the clear technical owner of the VPN infrastructure domain.
• Uptime at world class market levels for similar products.

We Believe in the Following Workplace Norms

• Allow OKRs to Guide Us
• Assume Positive Intent
• Agree to Disagree & Commit
• Set New Precedents
• Accomplish More with Less
• Hold Yourself & Others to High Standards
• Speak Up
• Be Resourceful
• Follow the 80/20 Rule

What We Are Offering

• We are a 100% remote-first, global company.
• A competitive compensation package.
• We offer generous perks and benefits to team members. 
• Participation in the Company's equity plan (for full-time team members).
• We provide individual bonuses in accordance with our Company Bonus Program.
• Work with energetic, passionate, and results-driven people.
• Celebrate team members' personal and work milestones.
• Remote social activities, including virtual coffee buddies. 
• Bonusly - We use Bonusly as a way to recognize and reward team members for their hard work and commitment.
• Weekly Wednesday Get Stuff Done Days (No Meetings).
• Open PTO, generous Company Holidays, and Wellness Days (for full-time team members).

This role is ideal for a results-driven marketing professional with a strong technical background and a keen eye for detail. If you are passionate about digital marketing and investor communications, we encourage you to apply and join a dynamic and innovative team.

If we just described you and your perfect role, we'd love to talk with you.  We have a lot to accomplish this year and look forward to making headway and creating success together!

Mode.Inc does not accept/pay fees for unsolicited resumes from third-party agencies/vendors.

Our company is an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) employer. We are committed to providing a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We celebrate diversity and strive to create an inclusive environment for all team members.