Bare-Metal Platform Engineer

Bare-Metal Platform Engineer

Audienzz AG · Engineering

Location: Preferably Zurich. Remote work from elsewhere in Europe is possible for the right candidate; regular presence in Zurich is required.

Employment: Permanent, full-time

Seniority: Senior / Staff

About Audienzz

Audienzz is a Swiss digital advertising company developing and operating technology for publishers, advertisers and media partners. Audienzz is part of the NZZ group and operates independently, with its own technology decisions. Our engineering organisation runs a highly automated infrastructure platform based on Linux, Kubernetes, Ceph and Bazel. The platform runs more than 200 stateful and stateless services on self-managed bare-metal infrastructure. We operate the underlying infrastructure ourselves and are looking for an experienced Platform Engineer to strengthen our platform team.

Your role

As a Bare-Metal Platform Engineer, you will take end-to-end responsibility for the infrastructure and build platform on which our applications and data systems run, working closely with the engineers who built and operate it today. The role spans Linux, Kubernetes, Ceph, networking, automation, CI/CD and our Bazel-based build system. It is a hands-on engineering position for someone who enjoys understanding complex systems from the operating system and network layer through to build, deployment and production operations.

Audienzz has around 80 people on the business side and an engineering team of around 40, with a small core of employees in Zurich and long-term external engineers across several European locations. Working language in engineering is English.

Your responsibilities

• Operate and further develop our Kubernetes infrastructure, including node lifecycle, upgrades, capacity planning and production troubleshooting
• Provision and manage our bare-metal Linux infrastructure using Ansible and automation
• Operate and evolve our self-managed Ceph storage platform
• Own and maintain our Bazel-based build system for more than 200 services, including custom Starlark tooling, remote caching and remote execution
• Develop and maintain our Helm-based deployment tooling and GitLab CI/CD infrastructure
• Operate and improve networking, load balancing, DNS, TLS and ingress infrastructure
• Ensure the reliability of stateful and stateless workloads through observability, backup and recovery, performance analysis and incident troubleshooting
• Improve platform architecture, security, documentation and operational processes together with the wider engineering team

What we expect

• Several years of hands-on experience operating self-managed Kubernetes in production (kubespray, kubeadm or comparable)
• Practical production experience with Ceph, including RBD, CephFS and/or object storage
• Strong Linux system administration and troubleshooting skills
• Experience running stateful workloads in Kubernetes
• Strong knowledge of configuration management, preferably Ansible
• Experience with Helm and infrastructure-as-code or GitOps workflows
• Experience owning CI/CD and build infrastructure
• Solid networking knowledge, including routing, DNS, TLS and load balancing
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms such as Prometheus and Grafana
• Experience with backup, restore and recovery of production systems
• A structured approach to reliability, automation and documentation
• Very good written and spoken English

You do not need to have worked with every technology in our stack. Strong fundamentals and the ability to understand, operate and improve complex infrastructure are more important than matching every individual tool. Production experience with self-managed Kubernetes and Ceph is required for this role.

Nice to have

Helpful, but not required: experience with Bazel or another large-scale build system, Go or Java for tooling, writing Kubernetes operators, experience in adtech or another data-intensive domain, and German.

Our technology stack

Infrastructure: Linux, Ansible, Kubernetes, containerd, etcd, Calico

Storage: Ceph, RBD, CephFS, object storage

Networking: MetalLB, ingress-nginx, Envoy, Gateway API, HAProxy

Delivery: Helm, helmfile, GitLab CI, Harbor, Renovate

Build: Bazel, Starlark, remote caching and remote execution

Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, Mimir, Loki, Tempo

Data: Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, Redis, Spark

Practical details

• Location: Preferably Zurich. Remote work from elsewhere in Europe is possible for the right candidate; regular presence in Zurich is required.
• On-call: Production alerts are routed to a Slack channel and handled by the platform team. There is currently no formal on-call rota; defining a sustainable on-call model as the team grows is part of this role.

What we offer

• A technically challenging role with substantial ownership of a sophisticated production infrastructure and build platform
• Direct influence on platform architecture and technology decisions, with short decision paths
• Close collaboration with experienced software and platform engineers
• Work across the full infrastructure stack, in an environment where infrastructure and deployments are managed through code
• An engineering culture focused on reliability, automation and continuous improvement

Interested?

Send us your CV together with a few sentences about the most challenging infrastructure environment or problem you have owned end to end, including where you have operated self-managed Kubernetes and Ceph, and at what scale.

jobs@audienzz.com

Subject: Bare-Metal Platform Engineer

Audienzz AG welcomes applications from candidates with different backgrounds and experiences. If you meet most of the requirements but not every individual point, we still encourage you to apply.