Posted today · be early
DevOps Engineer
Colonist
WorldwideremotePosted 1 day ago
Skill Required
DevOps-EngineerDevOps-Software-EngineerCloud-DevOps-EngineerDevOps-Automation-EngineerInfrastructure-DevOps-EngineerAWS-DevOps-EngineerTechOps-EngineerCloudOps-EngineerDevOps EngineerDevOpsObservabilityPostgreSQLKubernetesnetworkingDatadogTerraformdebuggingsecuritybuildingwrittenDockerRedisLinuxCloudandGoCIAIFulltime
Key highlights
- Compensation: Paid in USD, Negotiable
- Experience Level: Senior-level DevOps
- Benefit: Unlimited vacation and budget for AI tools
- Requirement: Production Kubernetes experience
- Location: Fully Remote
- Work Style: Asynchronous
Role overview
Colonist is building the biggest digital board game platform on the internet, featuring 250k games daily and a fully remote, asynchronous team. The Colonist DevOps Engineer will own the infrastructure behind every game session—including clusters, deploys, databases, and the edge—ensuring the platform can absorb massive traffic spikes (up to 50k CCU) without dropping games or experiencing lag.
Responsibilities
- Own the stack behind every game: game, matchmaking and lobby servers on Kubernetes
- Manage cluster and cloud resources as code in Terraform
- Scale servers up and down with live traffic. Pay for players, not idle machines
- Ship updates often, without kicking players out of live games
- Keep terabytes of game data and replays fast and cheap. PostgreSQL, Redis, NATS under real load
- Defend the edge from bots and attacks. Cloudflare, rate limiting, Turnstile, R2.
- Own observability across Sentry and New Relic. Consolidate monitoring and close the gaps
- Document everything: systems, decisions, runbooks, so infrastructure knowledge lives in the team
- Build self-service paths so other engineers use infrastructure confidently.
- When something breaks, thousands notice in seconds. Find the root cause. Make it never recur
Requirements
- You love hard technical problems. Scale, latency and cost excite you
- You have senior-level experience in DevOps
- You have run Kubernetes in production: rollouts, autoscaling, networking, load balancers, and debugging a bad deploy
- You run infra lean. You optimize before adding hardware
- You document as you go. Runbooks and decisions are natural outputs of your work.
- You are comfortable with Linux, Docker, and a CI system you did not build
- You have operated PostgreSQL and Redis under real traffic: slow queries, connection limits, and schema migrations without downtime
- You have run a message broker in production; we use NATS, but equivalent experience transfers
- You have put Cloudflare, or a similar edge, in front of a public service
- You can debug a live incident across app logs, metrics, the database, and the edge
- AI-forward mindset. We see AI fluency as a real multiplier
- Deeply independent. You learn a system from its code, configs and monitoring.
- Strong written communication. You explain complex systems clearly in async settings, to technical and non-technical audiences alike
- Collaborative by default. You share context proactively, help other engineers understand infrastructure, and never operate as a silo
Nice to have
- Experience structuring documentation for AI consumption: machine-readable runbooks, structured architecture notes, agent-readable formats
- Experience building self-service infrastructure paths for other engineers: golden paths, templates, or internal tooling
- Security depth beyond the basics: threat modelling, access control, audit practices, governance guardrails
- You've run real-time or multiplayer systems where shared state matters.
- Previous experience as a solo or near-solo infrastructure engineer at a small company
Benefits
- Unlimited vacation
- Yearly team offsite
- Full work equipment
- Budget to experiment with any AI tool you want
- Access to all company metrics and internal discussions
Additional details
- Working Hours: We work asynchronously and value outcomes over hours
- Location: Fully Remote
- Compensation: Paid in USD. Negotiable based on experience and location
- Our Values at Colonist: Dependability (self-driven players who deliver without needing supervision), Ownership (full responsibility to improve Colonist), Clear Communication (direct, structured written communication), Efficient Execution (move fast, focus on impact, find practical ways forward), Continuous Learning (curious problem solvers who embrace feedback)
- Your work ships to 3,6M+ yearly active players
- Async culture; deep work, no performative meetings
- Originally posted on Himalayas
