DevOps Engineer

Wanted: Colonist DevOps Engineer

Working Hours: We work asynchronously and value outcomes over hours

Location: Fully Remote

Compensation:

• Competitive salary paid in USD

• Negotiable range based on experience and location

About Colonist

We're building the biggest digital board game platform on the internet. Last year, our players spent 3,037 years playing 60 million games on our Settlers of Catan alternative. We're a fully remote, asynchronous team spread across multiple continents, focused on crafting extremely polished digital board games that people truly love.

About The Role

As a DevOps Engineer at Colonist, your mission is to strengthen and solidify Colonist’s DevOps and infrastructure capabilities. You'll be owning clusters, deploys, data stores, the edge, and the path from merge to production platform serving millions of active players. Your technical depth and documentation-first mindset will reduce the single-person bottleneck and make our systems legible to engineers and AI tools alike.

What You'll Do

• Own Colonist's infrastructure end to end. Kubernetes clusters across dev, staging, and production, Docker builds, and DigitalOcean services

• Manage cluster and cloud resources as code in Terraform

• Move production deploys from a manual weekly release toward safer, more frequent ones

• Own capacity: autoscaling, load balancer and connection limits

• Document everything: systems, architecture decisions, runbooks, incidents, so infrastructure knowledge lives in the team

• Maintain and improve the path from merge to production

• Operate PostgreSQL, Redis, and NATS under real production traffic; slow query investigation, connection and capacity limits, safe schema migrations under traffic, running NATS in our Kubernetes cluster and message compatibility across rolling deploys

• Keep Cloudflare configuration tight: DNS, proxying, caching, rate limiting, Turnstile, and R2 for static assets

• Own observability across Sentry, New Relic, and consolidate our monitoring tools, and close the gaps you identify

• Build self-service paths and guardrails that let other engineers use infrastructure confidently

• Respond to incidents, drive root cause analysis, and write postmortems that prevent the same class of problem from recurring

Requirements

• You have senior-level experience in DevOps

• You have run Kubernetes in production: rollouts, autoscaling, networking, load balancers, and debugging a bad deploy

• You document as you go — systems, decisions, and runbooks are a natural output of your work, not an afterthought

• You are comfortable with Linux, Docker, and a CI system you did not build

• You have operated PostgreSQL and Redis under real traffic: slow queries, connection limits, and schema migrations without downtime

• You have run a message broker in production; we use NATS, but equivalent experience transfers

• You have put Cloudflare, or a similar edge, in front of a public service

• You can debug a live incident across app logs, metrics, the database, and the edge

• AI-forward mindset. We see AI fluency as a real multiplier

• Deeply independent — you can enter an existing system, understand it by reading the code, configs, and monitoring, and make meaningful progress without needing someone to walk you through everything

• Strong written communication — you explain complex systems clearly in async settings, to technical and non-technical audiences alike

• Collaborative by default — you share context proactively, help other engineers understand infrastructure, and never operate as a silo

Nice to Have

• Experience structuring documentation for AI consumption; machine-readable runbooks, structured architecture notes, agent-readable formats

• Experience building self-service infrastructure paths for other engineers; golden paths, templates, or internal tooling

• Security depth beyond the basics; threat modelling, access control, audit practices, governance guardrails

• Cloud cost visibility and optimization

• Live services or gaming background. You understand what infrastructure downtime means when real players are mid-game

• Previous experience as a solo or near-solo infrastructure engineer at a small company

Our Values at Colonist

We strongly adhere to these values in our team - if these resonate, then you'll love working here!

Dependability

We're self-driven players who deliver without needing supervision. When we commit to something, we make it happen.

Ownership

We take full responsibility and go beyond our roles to improve Colonist.

Clear Communication

In our remote environment, written communication is key. We're direct, structured, and always keep our team in the loop.

Efficient Execution

We move fast and focus on impact. Instead of getting stuck on perfect solutions, we find practical ways forward and get things done.

Continuous Learning

We're curious problem solvers who love a challenge. We constantly seek new ideas, embrace feedback, and aren't afraid to change our minds when we're wrong.

Why Colonist

• Your work ships to 3,6M+ yearly active players

• Async culture; deep work, no performative meetings

• Unlimited vacation, yearly team offsite, full work equipment

• Budget to experiment with any AI tool you want

• Access to all company metrics and internal discussions