Principal DevOps Engineer

**Principal DevOps Engineer** **\* About Octostar** Octostar is an investigative intelligence platform used by national security agencies, law enforcement and financial institutions. It provides large\-scale investigative analytics and AI\-assisted analysis, and is deployed in the cloud, on\-premise and in fully air\-gapped environments. Founded in 2023, Octostar is headquartered in Galway, Ireland, with an office in Bergamo, Italy. **\* The role** We are looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer to take responsibility for the infrastructure Octostar runs on: cloud and on\-premise hosting, Kubernetes clusters, the release pipeline and the air\-gapped installer. The role covers design, implementation, day\-to\-day operation and documentation. This is an individual contributor role. You will report to the CTO and work alongside the DevOps team and senior engineers. The work is mostly hands\-on engineering. **\* Responsibilities** * **\*\*Environments.\*\*** Provision and maintain all environments, from CI to production, as infrastructure\-as\-code. * **\*\*Kubernetes.\*\*** Design, deploy and operate the Kubernetes clusters, in the cloud and on\-premise. * **\*\*Air\-gapped delivery.\*\*** Build and maintain the offline installer. Customers install with no internet access, so every image, chart and dependency normally downloaded at install time must be included. * \*\*CI/CD and developer workflow.\*\* Maintain the build and release pipelines and the local development setup, and keep them consistent with the deployed environments. * **\*\*Network security.\*\*** Operate private networks with allow\-listed egress and monitor outbound traffic. * **\*\*Observability.\*\*** Maintain the monitoring, logging, tracing and alerting systems. * **\*\*Cost.\*\*** Track infrastructure spend and size resources, including GPU capacity, based on measured usage. * **\*\*AI infrastructure.\*\*** Deploy and operate model endpoints and inference serving. * **\*\*Customer installations.\*\*** Communicate with customers during installations and upgrades. * **\*\*Documentation.\*\*** Maintain architecture documents, a decision log and runbooks. **\* Requirements** * Extensive experience designing, deploying and operating production Kubernetes clusters, in the cloud and on\-premise. * A track record of owning infrastructure from design through to production operation. * In\-depth knowledge of Linux administration and networking. * Experience managing infrastructure as code and building CI/CD pipelines. * Proficiency in scripting (Bash, Python or similar). * Experience troubleshooting production Linux systems and running a self\-hosted observability stack (Prometheus, Loki or similar). * The ability to write clear technical documentation. * Excellent written and spoken English. * Experience supporting customer IT teams during on\-premise installations and upgrades. **\* Nice to have** * Experience delivering software to air\-gapped environments. * Knowledge of RKE2/K3s. * Operational knowledge of Postgres, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Temporal and S3\-compatible object storage. * Familiarity with LLM and model serving (vLLM, Ray Serve or similar). **\* What we offer** * Competitive salary and equity, commensurate with experience. * 20 days of annual leave. * Flexible working arrangements. **\* Practicalities** * **\*\*Contract:\*\*** Full\-time. * **\*\*Location:\*\*** Ireland or Italy. **Offices in Galway and Bergamo** ; remote or hybrid depending on where you are. * **\*\*Process:\*\*** An introductory call, followed by a technical interview. * **\*\*Apply:\*\*** Via LinkedIn or by sending an email to careers@octostar.com.