№ 1037 · Product IT company, 1,000+ people · Remote · Russia
Deploy Ops Team Lead at a large product IT company — remote from Russia
A player-coach for a team of 4 engineers responsible for the CI/CD infrastructure and the cold backup service.
About the company
A large product IT company, a leader in its segment of online services.
Tens of millions of users per month, 1,000+ employees.
A strong engineering culture, little bureaucracy, lots of autonomy.
About the role
We are looking for a lead for a team of 4 engineers responsible for the CI/CD infrastructure and the cold backup service. This is a player-coach role: you lead people and priorities, but you also untangle complex situations yourself and take part in technical reviews.
The team currently has no lead: you will be able to build the processes and the area of responsibility from scratch.
What you will do
- Team: regular 1:1s, feedback, IDPs, hiring and onboarding, performance reviews and personnel decisions.
- Planning: translating quarterly goals into working sprints, estimating team workload, syncing with neighbouring teams.
- Component ownership: distributing ownership within the team, a buddy system and knowledge transfer; handing some components over to specialised teams together with documentation, support commitments and verified recovery.
- Technical development: unifying IaC approaches (Terraform and SaltStack) within the team's area, introducing engineering practices, updates, segmentation and secrets management together with InfoSec.
- Reliability: defining SLOs and target RTO/RPO together with system owners, monitoring and regular checks.
- Incidents and outages: coordinating recovery (who, what, in which order), postmortems and making sure that measures against recurrence are actually carried out.
- Cold backups: reliable storage and delivery of copies, checking that they are usable, recovery drills.
- Resources: capacity and budget planning, justifying infrastructure changes.
Stack
GitLab, Jenkins, Nexus, Terraform, SaltStack, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, Linux, Prometheus, Grafana, Yandex Cloud, VK Cloud.
What matters
- 5+ years of experience in infrastructure, of which 2+ years as the head of an engineering team.
- Proven management experience: developing engineers, organising on-call duty, projects seen through to the end, restoring services after outages.
- Your own hands-on expertise with CI/CD infrastructure (GitLab, Jenkins, Nexus): repositories and artifacts, build capacity, access, failure diagnostics and recovery.
- A strong technical foundation: Linux, networks, DNS, TLS, storage and access management, the ability to find the causes of failures from metrics and logs.
- Practical knowledge of IaC: Git, reviews, configuration management, autotests and automated rollout of changes.
- Experience building redundancy and protected backups, DR plans that take dependencies into account, tested in real drills.
- A balanced approach to technical decisions: balancing availability, acceptable data loss, security, cost and team capacity, and the ability to argue for that balance.
Terms
- Fully remote with a flexible schedule: offices in three Russian cities are open to everyone if they wish.
- Official employment under the Russian Labour Code.
- Transparent processes: performance reviews twice a year, a clear engineering track, a mentor at the start, an individual development plan.
- Health insurance from day one: dental care, hospitalisation, travel insurance for trips abroad.
- 31 days of vacation + 5 days off + 10 sick days.
- Budget for learning, fitness and mental health.
- Real influence on processes and architecture.