Middle+ / Senior SRE Engineer (Linux/Kubernetes) at a large product IT company — remote from Russia

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

Positions are open in two teams of the infrastructure cluster. We will decide on the team and grade after the interviews, based on your experience.

What you will do

In the Core track, the tasks may include:

• Automate the operation of Linux servers (bare-metal and VM), network services, Kubernetes, CloudNativePG and Nexus.
• Build and develop infrastructure pipelines in GitLab CI and Jenkins, with checks, rollback and notifications.
• Update the OS and packages without downtime: take quorums and roles into account, drain k8s nodes and bring them back, run checks before and after, set up automatic rollback.
• Manage configuration via Salt and Terraform: all changes go through merge requests, and you review your colleagues' changes.
• Write automation tools in Python or Bash: API wrappers, readiness checks, fleet status reports.
• Act as a buddy to the owner of 1–2 components, be on call, be part of the escalation group for SLO alerts.
• Maintain runbooks and documentation, take part in incident reviews, turn manual operations into automation.
• Take part in the team's quarterly projects (OS and component version migrations, network segmentation, IaC development) and help junior engineers.

And within the Kubernetes platform you will do the following:

• Deploy and operate Kubernetes clusters.
• Be responsible for upgrades: check version compatibility, prepare a rollback plan, check applications and system components after the upgrade.
• Maintain monitoring and SLOs, eliminate sources of instability. On call, independently handle serious incidents and bring in the owners of adjacent systems.
• Automate deployment and operation via Terraform, CI/CD and GitOps, develop ArgoCD and the container registry.
• Together with neighbouring teams and InfoSec, implement network isolation, RBAC and secure secrets delivery.
• Run node and site failure drills, restore clusters from saved configurations and data, plan capacity and costs.
• Adapt the set of components to another Russian cloud provider, taking its limitations into account.
• Advise platform and product teams on Kubernetes and application diagnostics, maintain guides, take part in reviews and train a buddy.

Stack

Linux, Kubernetes, Cilium, ArgoCD, Helm/Kustomize, Terraform, SaltStack, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, CloudNativePG, Nexus, Vault, Yandex Cloud, VK Cloud.

What matters

• 4+ years of experience operating high-load infrastructure as an SRE, DevOps Engineer or Linux administrator, with on-call duty and independent incident handling.
• Deep knowledge of Linux and networks: processes, memory, I/O, cgroups, DNS, TLS, L4/L7 load balancing, diagnostics with tcpdump, ss, mtr.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes: at the level of cluster administration (control plane, upgrades, CNI, CSI, RBAC, recovery, stateful components).
• Hands-on experience with IaC and configuration: Terraform (modules, state, import), Salt (ideally), changes via MRs and reviews.
• Skills in building CI/CD for infrastructure, not only for building applications; experience with automation in Bash, Python or Go (a plus).
• Understanding of monitoring principles: metrics, logs, alerts (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents).
• Experience rolling out safe changes in production: staged rollout, checks between steps, idempotency, dry-run, auto-rollback.
• Autonomy: you drive tasks and projects to results yourself, flag risks early and can work in close collaboration with engineering and InfoSec.
• The ability to work with AI agents in a way where you check the resulting code, permissions and the consequences of changes yourself.
• The platform requires administering K8s clusters in production; experience deploying applications is not enough.

Nice to have

• Experience with Yandex Cloud, VK Cloud, OpenStack or multiple providers.
• Own infrastructure: deploying Kubernetes outside a managed service, bare-metal (IPMI, RAID), KVM/Proxmox.
• Zero-downtime updates: OS, cluster components (PostgreSQL, etcd, Consul, Kafka) and fleets of hundreds of hosts.
• Experience with Vault, Cilium/Calico, DBMS operators, inter-cluster networking.
• Skills in testing infrastructure code (pytest, molecule, terraform test) and blameless postmortems.

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: many decisions of your own, Disaster Recovery drills, high ownership.
• Scale: 10+ Kubernetes clusters, more than 1,000 nodes and 15k+ pods in the main production, hundreds of DB clusters.