DevOps Engineer

📋 Job Overview

Wanted: Colonist DevOps Engineer

Working Hours: We work asynchronously and value outcomes over hours
Location: Fully Remote
Compensation: Paid in USD. Negotiable based on experience and location

🏢 About Colonist

We're building the biggest digital board game platform on the internet. Players start 250k games every day. Last year: 60M games, 3,037 years of play. We're a fully remote, asynchronous team spread across multiple continents, focused on crafting extremely polished digital board games that people truly love.

🎯 The Role

Most apps scale by splitting users apart. We can't. Players share one live game state. Every lag spike is felt mid-game. One viral video can 10x our traffic overnight. Your job: absorb 50k CCU without dropping a single game.

You will own the infrastructure behind every game session: clusters, deploys, databases, the edge, and the path from merge to production. You will make our infra knowledge shared, so no system depends on one person.

✅ Key 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

📌 Required Qualifications

• 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

⭐ Desirable Experience

• 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

Your work ships to 3,6M+ yearly active players
We have hard problems, most engineers only read about: live shared state, viral spikes, lean scale
Async culture; deep work, no performative meetings
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

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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