Senior DevOps Engineer

Are you looking to be key technical contributor to a fast-growing AI platform that’s redefining how the world builds intelligent systems? Do you want the chance to participate in the open-source AI movement? Are you passionate about building the future of AI alongside a world-class machine learning (ML) team, within a remote-first culture that values ownership and initiative? Then Flower Labs is the place for you.At Flower Labs, we’re looking who wants to use their talents to architect, design and implement tools and platforms that will be used by millions of people world-wide (including scientists, engineers, students) and have a profound impact on the future of various societally important domains such as medicine, and more. As Senior DevOps Engineer, you’ll play a critical role in building critical pieces of the #1 open-source solution for federated and decentralized AI — already trusted by Fortune 500 companies and a 6000+ developer community. About the companyFlower Labs is the world-class AI startup behind Flower, the most popular open-source framework in the world for training AI on distributed data and compute resources using federated learning. Trusted by industry leaders such as Mozilla, Owkin, Banking Circle, JP Morgan, Samsung, Temenos and Bosch, Flower enables organizations to improve their AI models on sensitive data that remains securely distributed across organizational silos or user devices. In a world where most AI relies on centralized public datasets — just a fraction of the data available — we believe unlocking access to (orders of magnitude more) private data will drive the next breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.Flower Labs is a Y Combinator (YCW23) graduate and backed by top-tier investors and renowned angels, including Felicis, First Spark Ventures, Mozilla Ventures, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue, GitHub Co-Founder Scott Chacon, Factorial Capital, Betaworks, and Pioneer Fund. Together, we are redefining how AI is built, deployed, and scaled.About the roleAs a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will play a key role in designing, automating, and operating the infrastructure that powers Flower’s open-source and enterprise platforms. You will collaborate closely with backend, research, and frontend teams to ensure that our systems are scalable, reliable, and secure. We are looking for engineers who can take technical leadership in modern cloud environments and help drive best practices in infrastructure-as-code, observability, and CI/CD. For this position we are currently hiring in the UK and Germany but are open other for Europe-based applicants to better align with the current time zones of most of the team.Infrastructure Design & AutomationDesign, implement, and maintain scalable, secure, and resilient cloud infrastructure using Terraform, OpenTofu, and Ansible.Develop infrastructure automation and deployment strategies across multiple environments (AWS, GCP, Azure).Define and enforce best practices for GitOps, configuration management, and infrastructure lifecycle.Work with engineering teams to design and evolve Kubernetes-based deployments for Flower’s products and open-source systems.Contribute to the long-term infrastructure roadmap, ensuring scalability and operational excellence.Operations & ReliabilityBuild and operate production-grade Kubernetes clusters, container runtimes, and CI/CD workflows.Develop monitoring and alerting pipelines using Prometheus, Grafana, and modern observability stacks.Maintain system reliability, resilience, and uptime through automation, runbooks, and continuous delivery.Continuously improve system performance, cost-efficiency, and security posture.Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues, promoting a culture of proactive observability.CI/CD & Workflow AutomationDesign and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines in GitLab and/or GitHub Actions.Implement and evolve GitOps workflows using tools like ArgoCD and Helm.Support engineering teams by automating testing, deployment, and infrastructure provisioning processes.Standardize CI/CD best practices and empower teams to deploy safely and autonomously.Performance & ReliabilityProfile, optimize, and refactor critical code paths to improve performance under real-world workloads.Design scalable storage, messaging, and computation solutions for federated and distributed systems.Ensure system reliability and resilience through automation, CI/CD, and observability practices.Security, Access, and ComplianceImplement secure design patterns for communication, authentication, and infrastructure management.Manage IAM, secret handling, and access control across multi-cloud environments.Contribute to security reviews and audits, including key management and network hardening.Collaborate on privacy-preserving infrastructure strategies supporting federated learning systems.Ensure compliance with internal and external standards for data protection and security.Collaboration & Open SourceCollaborate with the open-source Flower community to improve deployment and observability tooling.Review and guide community contributions related to DevOps, infrastructure, and CI/CD.Document infrastructure standards, provide training, and share knowledge across teams.Represent Flower in relevant community events, conferences, and technical forums.About the teamYou can expect a mission-driven, collaborative, fast-paced start-up environment with experts in their respective fields. Everyone learns something new every day. Since we are still in the early phases of our mission (i.e., taking decentralized AI mainstream), you will have many opportunities to contribute ideas, be heard, and influence the direction of the company across the board. On a personal level, we value collaboration over competition. We're working in a highly competitive field and believe we can only win by collaborating and acting as one team.About youWe’re looking for a strategic and hands-on DevOps engineer who’s passionate about building resilient infrastructure, automating complex systems, and empowering world-class engineering teams to deliver the future of AI with speed, reliability, and security.Must-have qualificationsProven experience with Terraform, OpenTofu, and AnsibleStrong knowledge of Kubernetes, Docker, and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD)Hands-on experience with Prometheus, Grafana, and modern observability stacksProficiency with GitLab and/or GitHub CI/CD pipelinesStrong Linux (Debian, Ubuntu) administration experiencePractical experience with AWS, GCP, or AzureExcellent written and verbal communication in EnglishSelf-driven, collaborative, and comfortable with asynchronous remote workOptional qualificationsExperience with OpenShift or OpenTelekomCloudFamiliarity with Helm, Kapitan, and advanced templating toolsKnowledge of Keycloak and IAM best practicesUnderstanding of distributed systems, networking, or site reliability engineering (SRE) principlesAn understanding of machine learningHands-on experience in PyTorch and multi-GPU environments