Roles we place.

Hire one when

Releases depend on one person and a wiki page nobody trusts.

The generalist who owns the path from commit to production. Good ones remove themselves as a bottleneck: they build pipelines developers can use without asking, and they write things down.

What we screen for

• Pipelines they designed themselves, and what they would change about them now
• Infrastructure as code written from scratch, with state and modules they can explain
• How they work with developers who would rather not think about infrastructure

Usual stack

GitLab CI / GitHub Actions / Terraform / Docker / AWS or Azure / Bash / Python

Hire one when

Uptime is written into a contract and nobody owns the error budget.

An engineer who treats reliability as a product with numbers attached. They set objectives, build the alerting that wakes the right person, and run the review afterwards without looking for someone to blame.

What we screen for

• An incident they led from first page to final review, in detail
• Service level objectives they defined and then had to defend
• Enough software engineering to fix the service, and not only restart it

Usual stack

Prometheus / Grafana / OpenTelemetry / Kubernetes / Go / PagerDuty / Postgres

Hire one when

Developers open a ticket and wait three days for an environment.

Builds the internal platform that other teams ship on. The job is half Kubernetes and half product thinking: paved roads, sane defaults, and a developer experience people choose to use.

What we screen for

• A platform other teams adopted willingly, and how they measured that
• Cluster upgrades and migrations they ran without a maintenance window
• Where they drew the line between what the platform does and what teams own

Usual stack

Kubernetes / Argo CD / Helm / Crossplane / Backstage / Terraform / Go

Hire one when

The migration is half finished and the data centre contract ends in spring.

Designs and builds the cloud estate itself: accounts, networks, identity and the landing zone everything else sits in. Often the first infrastructure hire, or the one who cleans up after a rushed move.

What we screen for

• A migration they planned, including what they chose to leave behind
• Networking and identity depth, since that is where rushed estates break
• Cost decisions they made deliberately and can put a figure on

Usual stack

AWS / Azure / Google Cloud / Terraform / Networking / IAM / Hetzner / OVHcloud

Hire one when

NIS2, DORA or a customer questionnaire is asking things you cannot answer yet.

Puts security into the delivery pipeline so that it happens on every commit and not once a year. Useful when compliance has a deadline, essential when your customers are banks or the public sector.

What we screen for

• Controls they automated, and the audit those controls then passed
• Secrets management they rolled out to teams who did not ask for it
• How they say no to a release without becoming the department of no

Usual stack

Vault / Trivy / OPA / Falco / SAST and DAST / ISO 27001 / SOC 2

Hire one when

Infrastructure has outgrown being somebody’s side project.

The person who turns a few capable engineers into a team with a roadmap, a budget and an on-call rota people can live with. Still technical enough to review the pull request.

What we screen for

• A team they built, who they hired first, and who stayed
• How they argued for platform investment with people who only see features
• An on-call setup they inherited and what they changed in the first quarter

Usual stack

Team building / Roadmaps / Budgets / Vendor choice / On-call design / Architecture