Lead DevOps Engineer

Department: Product & Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent employee

Schedule: Full-time

Seniority: Experienced

Location: Madrid, Dublin

As a Lead DevOps Engineer, you’ll own the design, reliability, and evolution of InteractiveAI’s production infrastructure, ensuring our platform is secure, scalable, observable, and fast to ship. You’ll guide a small, high-impact team of DevOps/SRE engineers, raising standards for uptime, deployment velocity, and operational excellence across cloud and hybrid environments.
You’ll work closely with AI Engineers, Backend Engineers, and Product teams to support demanding workloads (including LLM/ Agent orchestration) while building a best-in-class AI engineering platform.
Your responsibilities will include:

• Architect and evolve InteractiveAI’s core infrastructure (networking, compute, storage, Kubernetes, CI/CD) to support rapid product delivery
• Build and operate cloud-agnostic environments (Kubernetes) across VPC, on-prem, and hybrid deployments
• Implement and maintain CI/CD for services and infrastructure (GitOps preferred), enabling safe and frequent deployments
• Define “gold standards” for reliability: SLOs/SLIs, incident response, on-call practices, runbooks, and postmortems
• Establish robust observability (metrics, logs, traces) with actionable alerting and performance monitoring
• Drive infrastructure-as-code across environments (Terraform/Pulumi/CloudFormation), including strong review/testing practices
• Own security fundamentals: secrets management, IAM, network segmentation, vulnerability management, and compliance readiness
• Improve developer productivity with internal tooling, self-service environments, and paved paths
• Optimize costs and capacity planning across clusters and workloads (including bursty inference/agent workloads)
• Mentor and grow a small DevOps team, fostering ownership, quality, and pragmatic execution

We’re seeking a hands-on technical leader with a builder’s mindset—someone who thrives in fast-moving environments, can scale systems and practices, and can lead through influence and example.
Minimum Requirements

• 5+ years in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, or Infrastructure roles
• Proven track record operating production systems with strong reliability and incident management practices
• Strong expertise with Linux, networking fundamentals, and cloud infrastructure patterns
• Deep knowledge of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience building and owning CI/CD pipelines for microservices and infrastructure
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)
• Strong scripting/coding ability (Python, Bash, Go, or similar)
• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, etc.)
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure)

Additional Requirements (Nice to Have)

• Experience with service mesh, API gateways, or ingress at scale (Istio/Linkerd, NGINX, Envoy, etc.)
• Familiarity with security & compliance practices (GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2 readiness)
• Experience supporting GPU clusters or high-throughput compute workloads (a plus for AI platforms)
• Exposure to MLOps/LLM serving infrastructure and performance/cost optimization
• Prior experience leading or mentoring engineers (formally or informally)

• Competitive base salary (€100,000/yr to €130,000/yr) + performance bonuses
• Access to equity/share plan as it rolls out
• Private health insurance
• Flexible work setup + travel when needed (hybrid in Dublin or Madrid; minimum 3 times per week in the office)
• 23 days PTO (excluding local public holidays)

• Proactive & Strategic: You anticipate scaling challenges and design systems that won’t collapse under growth.
• Technical Leader: You raise the bar with strong engineering fundamentals, clarity, and high standards.
• Accountable & High-Ownership: You take responsibility for uptime, security, and delivery outcomes.
• Builder Mentality: You move fast in ambiguity while keeping production safe and predictable.
• Collaborative Partner: You communicate clearly, build trust across teams, and balance pragmatism with long-term vision.

We keep our process focused and respectful of your time. Most candidates complete it in 2–3 weeks.
Here’s what to expect:

1. Intro Call – 30 minutes with our team to align on fit and expectations
2. Technical Challenge – A practical DevOps/SRE design or automation task
3. Technical Interview – Deep dive into infrastructure architecture, reliability, security, and delivery practices
4. Leadership & Values Interview – Assess alignment with InteractiveAI’s culture and growth mindset
5. Offer – Final conversation and offer

We’re building a team of builders — people who care about impact, quality, and growth.
If that’s you, let’s talk !