DevOps Engineer (Mid / Senior)

Project overview

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.

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

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.

• 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.
• 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

Responsibilities

Probably not a match if you

What we offer

Recruitment process

• 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
• 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
• 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
• Screening call (~30 min) — your experience and expectations.
• Technical interview (60–90 min) — Kubernetes, networking, observability, troubleshooting; scenario questions and a detailed walk-through of real incidents you handled yourself.
• Manager interview (~45 min) — how you work: autonomy, communication, mistakes, disagreement and pressure.

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

Project details

• Start: flexible
• Remote: onsite
• Location: Gdańsk, Limbowa 23, PL
• Rate: 125-175 EUR/h
• Languages: Polish, English