System Administrator / DevOps Engineer

Location: Darmstadt, Germany (Flexible Work-from-Home Policy)

Employment: Half-time to full-time

About us

We build high-performance networking and AI acceleration solutions and run a mixed environment of on-prem, self-hosted services and cloud. We’re looking for someone who loves making systems fast, secure, observable, and reliable, so our software engineers can ship without distractions.

What you’ll do

• Own core infrastructure: Plan, provision, and maintain servers and virtualization (e.g., KVM/Proxmox/VMware), storage, and networking (VLANs, routing, firewalls).
• Run our self-hosted stack: NFS, LDAP/Directory, GitLab, Redmine (and friends like Keycloak, Vault, Artifactory/Registry, runners, mirrors, backups).
• Security as a first-class deliverable:
  • Hardening, patch/firmware management, vulnerability scanning, EDR/AV, disk encryption.
  • SSO/MFA, certificate/PKI management, secrets handling, access reviews (principle of least privilege).
  • Email/domain security (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), VPN/Zero-Trust access, secure Wi-Fi.
  • Incident response playbooks and periodic tabletop tests.
• Automation & CI/CD: Infra-as-Code (Ansible/Terraform), GitOps where it fits, CI runners, build caches, dependency proxies.
• Containers & orchestration: Docker/Podman; optionally Kubernetes for internal services (monitoring, runners, registries).
• Observability & reliability: Central logging (ELK/Opensearch), metrics/alerts (Prometheus/Grafana), uptime checks, SLOs and runbooks. Test restores regularly.
• Backups & DR: Strategy, scheduling, off-site/immutable copies, restore drills; service-level recovery objectives defined and met.
• Endpoint & identity lifecycle: MDM for Windows/macOS/Linux, user onboarding/offboarding, device inventory, license management.
• Developer experience: Fast, stable CI, reproducible dev environments, internal package registries, clear docs and self-service.
• Compliance hygiene: GDPR basics, asset inventory, change management, minimal paperwork that actually helps.

What you bring

• Experience in SysAdmin/DevOps/SRE or similar, owning production-grade Linux systems.
• Strong with Linux, virtualization (KVM/Proxmox/VMware), networking fundamentals, and filesystems.
• Hands‑on with LDAP/Directory, NFS/SMB, GitLab (incl. runners & backups), and issue trackers (e.g., Redmine/Jira).
• Solid security mindset: hardening, patching, MFA/SSO, secrets, certs, VPNs, basic incident response.
• Can automate with Bash and at least one of Python/Go, plus Ansible/Terraform (or similar).
• Familiar with monitoring/logging stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) and backup tooling.
• Clear communicator; you write concise docs and like making complex things simple for others.

Nice to have

• Kubernetes (small internal clusters), Keycloak/Okta, HashiCorp Vault, WireGuard, pfSense/OPNsense.
• Azure/AWS basics for hybrid setups; cost/usage guardrails.
• Experience in high-performance networks, RDMA/RoCE, or hardware acceleration environments.
• ISO 27001 exposure, threat modeling, or security audit experience.
• Scripting small internal tools and bots to reduce toil.

What success looks like (first 90 days)

• You’ve mapped our services, standardized backups, and successfully performed a test restore.
• CI runners are fast and reliable; engineers feel friction drop.
• Baseline hardening, MFA/SSO, and alerting are in place with actionable runbooks.

Why you’ll like it here

• Impact: You’ll own the backbone of a deep‑tech product team.
• Autonomy: Choose pragmatic tools, introduce sane guardrails, and automate yourself out of toil.
• Team: Sharp engineers who appreciate reliable infra and good documentation.

Sound like you?

Send a short intro and your CV/GitHub to . A brief note on your favorite homelab trick or a war story (what broke, how you fixed it) is a plus.