Senior Platform Engineer

Who we are

Ilkari is a privately‐held start‐up based in Dublin, Ireland. We deliver hyper‐private scale innovation and technology to safeguard and secure data, enabling true data sovereignty even as the pace of change accelerates. Our best‐in‐breed sovereign technology delivers privacy and control over where companies' data resides, where it flows, and how it's accessed.

We're here to rewrite the story of data sovereignty – empowering innovators, pioneers and visionaries to make their mark. We believe the sky is not the limit. We strive for the perfect balance of simplicity and excellence in everything we do, and we're looking for people who are ready to join our journey and rewrite the story of data sovereignty.

Role overview

We're looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to join our Engineering team and take a lead role in building and operating the infrastructure that underpins our products and services. You'll focus on delivering secure, reliable, and scalable platforms, with a strong emphasis on OpenStack, to support our sovereign cloud strategy and meet customer expectations.

This role is critical to supporting our business goals — enabling faster delivery of features, improving system uptime, and reducing operational risk. You'll be responsible for designing, automating, and optimising our platform stacks, while working closely with engineering, product, and operations teams to reduce technical debt, improve maintainability, and ensure our infrastructure is ready to scale with the business.

New to OpenStack? No problem. If your Linux, Automation, and other required skills and expertise are strong and you're eager to learn, we'll help you get production‐ready.

What you'll do

Own platform reliability for OpenStack, Proxmox, and Kubernetes, define SLOs, manage performance, security, and resilience.

Drive adoption of Infrastructure‐as‐Code (Terraform, Ansible) and GitOps across provisioning and operations.

Own Kubernetes end‐to‐end on bare‐metal, OpenStack, and Proxmox : cluster build / upgrade, day‐2 ops, backup / restore, and multi‐cluster management.

Lead observability for the platforms, logging, metrics, traces, alerting and tune systems for performance and signal‐to‐noise.

Evaluate, standardise, and lifecycle platform components (patching, upgrades, compatibility) to meet performance, compliance, and availability standards.

Capacity management, right‐size compute / storage / network, plan headroom, forecast demand, and optimise utilisation.

Run architectural reviews, lead incident response and post‐mortems, and drive continuous reliability improvements.

Create and maintain clear documentation - runbooks, diagrams, standards and deliver internal training / mentoring to scale good operations.

Participate in and potentially lead the on‐call escalation process for critical incidents.

What are we looking for

Technical Skills

5+ years in Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or DevOps roles.

Hands‐on with OpenStack and Proxmox in production (or) strong platform fundamentals with a clear willingness to learn OpenStack; you'll ramp up via self‐study, mentoring, and incremental ownership.

In‐depth experience with Linux systems administration, performance tuning, and hardening.

Strong proficiency with Infrastructure‐as‐Code using tools such as Terraform and Ansible.

Expert‐level scripting and automation skills (e.g., Python, Bash, or similar).

Familiarity with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or Datadog.

Strong understanding of core networking concepts such as TCP / IP, DNS, Routing protocols and load balancing strategies.

Experience integrating infrastructure workflows with CI / CD systems (e.g., GitLab CI, ArgoCD).

Compliance mindset, familiar with CIS benchmarks / ISO 27001 / SOC2 controls and how they map to platform ops.

Soft Skills

Very good problem‐solving skills, open mind towards suggestions and can‐do attitude

Self‐motivated and self‐managing, with excellent organisational skills.

Clear communication, documentation, and cross‐team collaboration skills.

What's in it for you

Private life and health insurance for you and your family.

Four weeks per year to work from anywhere for eligible employees.

Gym reimbursement.

Company bus applicable for employees based in Málaga city.

Learning Pocket for personal development.

A hybrid working model with flexible hours.

3 volunteering paid days each year.

Generous referral bonus programme.

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