Senior Infrastructure Engineer (f/m/d)

Help us decarbonize the cement and concrete industry. alcemy was founded to reduce the massive CO2 footprint of the cement and concrete industry. Concrete is humanity's second most used material by volume and its production is responsible for around 8% of global CO2 emissions.

We are changing this! We leverage machine learning to provide smart production control software to the cement and concrete supply chain to improve efficiency and allow for the production of low-carbon cement and concrete at large scale. Our software is used 24/7 in cement and concrete plants to optimize production and reduce carbon emissions today. We are currently enabling our customers to save more than 100 000 tons of CO2 emissions each year and we aim to save 100 million tons per year in 2030.

What you’d be doing:

• Build, deploy and ship infrastructure for cloud-native software solutions together with our product teams.
• Work closely with other engineers to ensure our AWS-based infrastructure, kubernetes platform, and development processes are top notch.
• Support application developers and ML specialists in their daily work with questions around tooling, deployment, CI/CD, and many others.
• Develop internal solutions and tooling - using Python or Go - to automate and optimize our setup.
• Evaluate our setup and processes to constantly improve it on a number of dimensions like cost, simplicity, and user adoption.
• Design for high security, reliability and availability including logging and monitoring of the environments.
• Mentor and provide guidance to others, fostering knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.

Within the first month, you will…

• Complete our onboarding and get guided through our development and CI/CD process and the details of our cloud infrastructure.
• Upgrade our kubernetes clusters and various components to a newer version, understanding our approach at upgrading.
• Meet the engineering team and learn about their challenges.
• Inevitably learn a lot about cement production or the intricacies of concrete data.

Within three months, you will…

• Develop a solid understanding of our entire platform, especially the kubernetes-based workload scheduler.
• Contribute code to our repositories, for example our Python-based CI helper chatbot.
• Actively participate in short- and long-term planning and shaping of our roadmap.
• Be able to assist other engineers when their applications fail by understanding logs and metrics.

Within six months, you will…

• Take full ownership of our entire infrastructure platform, knowing how to approach any alert or error message that pops up somewhere.
• Improve engineering processes through automation, such that every engineer becomes more efficient.
• Assume a mentor role for other engineers to constantly improve our knowledge.

Requirements

You’d be a great fit if:

• You have a number of years of experience working with AWS, especially with a multi-account setup.
• You have significant knowledge of running applications in the cloud with kubernetes and Helm, and you understand the inner workings of these tools and others from the ecosystem like Prometheus, Loki, Argo Workflows, Karpenter, etc.
• You have in-depth knowledge in infrastructure-as-code and expertise with Terraform.
• You have a strong commitment to DevOps principles (CI/CD) and can lead the way.
• You don’t shy away from the shell, Bash scripting, and git.
• You are a great communicator and documenter.
• You care about fighting climate change.

Even better:

• You have previous experience of working in an infrastructure role in a startup and know about the particular challenges.
• You have some cybersecurity expertise.
• You know how to set up CI pipelines with Gitlab.
• You know how to fine-tune postgres databases for performance.
• You have written your own kubernetes controller.

Benefits

What we offer:

• A company culture where honesty, professionalism, and integrity run deep with an open feedback culture and regular 1:1 meetings.
• Flat hierarchies, efficient decision-making processes, and an agile company structure.
• Competitive market-rate salary aligned with your experience.
• VSOP equity options vested equally over 4 years (for working 40h a week/full time)
• Work fully remotely within Germany or from our office in the heart of Berlin with flexible working hours. We offer a Berlin-based contract with a remote clause, meaning Berlin bank holidays will apply.
• Of course, free drinks, fruit and snacks in the office.
• Regular team activities and team weeks a few times per year.
• Mac laptop.
• Budget for personal and professional development - 1500€/year & 3 days/quarter.
• English is our main language of communication.
• 28 days of vacation per year and an additional day of vacation every 2 years at alcemy.
• Access to nilo.health - the comprehensive mental well-being platform that provides access to 1-to-1 sessions with psychologists, group sessions and self-guided tools.
• Access to heynanny - flexible childcare and eldercare support with on-demand nannies, eldercare services, live webinars, and one-on-one calls for professional guidance.
• Dog-friendly office with specific rules in place, as well as dog-free areas for work and relaxation.
• Regular knowledge-sharing through our internal masterclasses.

Our Tech stack:

• Our applications and data are hosted entirely on AWS, we make use of a variety of their services. EKS, EC2, RDS, and S3 are among them. We manage all of this infrastructure as code with Terraform in a Git repository.
• We want reliability, scalability, and flexibility, so we built a kubernetes-based platform for running our applications. Deployment is automated and hooked tightly into our development workflow. Most engineers know how to interact and work with the platform.
• All our code lives on Gitlab and we use Gitlab CI to drive our development process.
• Our applications are written in Python using a number of different frameworks like FastAPI or scikit-learn. The frontend applications are built on top of NextJS and React.

Hiring Process

• Initial 1:1 screening call (30 minutes)
• Complete a take-home task relevant to the actual work you’d be doing
• Technical interview (90 minutes)
• Team interview (45 minutes)
• Founder Check-In Call (30 minutes)
• Reference check - we contact two references you provide (e.g. former work colleagues)
• Decision

We encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds to apply. We also understand how stressful interviews can be. Let us know if there is anything we can do to improve the process so you can demonstrate your skills. To do so, contact Magdalena Milecka at [email protected].

Note: We currently do not offer visa sponsorships or relocation support. You must already have the legal right to work in the EU in order to apply.