Principal DevOps Engineer

Principal DevOps Engineer * About Octostar Octostar is an investigative intelligence platform used by national security agencies, law enforcement and financial institutions. It provides large-scale investigative analytics and AI-assisted analysis, and is deployed in the cloud, on-premise and in fully air-gapped environments. Founded in 2023, Octostar is headquartered in Galway, Ireland, with an office in Bergamo, Italy. * The role We are looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer to take responsibility for the infrastructure Octostar runs on: cloud and on-premise hosting, Kubernetes clusters, the release pipeline and the air-gapped installer. The role covers design, implementation, day-to-day operation and documentation. This is an individual contributor role. You will report to the CTO and work alongside the DevOps team and senior engineers. The work is mostly hands-on engineering. * Responsibilities **Environments.** Provision and maintain all environments, from CI to production, as infrastructure-as-code.**Kubernetes.** Design, deploy and operate the Kubernetes clusters, in the cloud and on-premise.**Air-gapped delivery.** Build and maintain the offline installer. Customers install with no internet access, so every image, chart and dependency normally downloaded at install time must be included.**CI/CD and developer workflow.** Maintain the build and release pipelines and the local development setup, and keep them consistent with the deployed environments.**Network security.** Operate private networks with allow-listed egress and monitor outbound traffic.**Observability.** Maintain the monitoring, logging, tracing and alerting systems.**Cost.** Track infrastructure spend and size resources, including GPU capacity, based on measured usage.**AI infrastructure.** Deploy and operate model endpoints and inference serving.**Customer installations.** Communicate with customers during installations and upgrades.**Documentation.** Maintain architecture documents, a decision log and runbooks. * Requirements Extensive experience designing, deploying and operating production Kubernetes clusters, in the cloud and on-premise. A track record of owning infrastructure from design through to production operation. In-depth knowledge of Linux administration and networking. Experience managing infrastructure as code and building CI/CD pipelines. Proficiency in scripting (Bash, Python or similar). Experience troubleshooting production Linux systems and running a self-hosted observability stack (Prometheus, Loki or similar). The ability to write clear technical documentation. Excellent written and spoken English. Experience supporting customer IT teams during on-premise installations and upgrades. * Nice to have Experience delivering software to air-gapped environments.Knowledge of RKE2/K3s.Operational knowledge of Postgres, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Temporal and S3-compatible object storage.Familiarity with LLM and model serving (vLLM, Ray Serve or similar). * What we offer Competitive salary and equity, commensurate with experience.20 days of annual leave.Flexible working arrangements. * Practicalities **Contract:** Full-time.**Location:** Ireland or Italy. Offices in Galway and Bergamo; remote or hybrid depending on where you are.**Process:** An introductory call, followed by a technical interview.**Apply:** Via LinkedIn or by sending an email to careers@octostar.com.