What You'll Actually Do

• Platform Engineering: Design, deploy and maintain production infrastructure for client workloads: Kubernetes is a key part of our toolkit and you will use it regularly, but you will also work across the broader platform stack including networking, storage, observability and CI/CD

• Reliability Engineering: Own the operational health of client platforms: you are comfortable with incident response, post-mortems and building systems that fail gracefully

• Open Source Solutions: Favour open source tooling that is well-maintained and community-aligned. You do not need to be an active upstream contributor, but you should understand the ecosystems you are working in and be able to evaluate tools critically

• Infrastructure as Code: Treat infrastructure configuration as software: version controlled, reviewed and repeatable. This is a mindset as much as a skill set and it shapes how you approach every engagement

• Client Partnership: Translate client operational needs into technical solutions. You will help clients understand the trade-offs between convenience and long-term maintainability

• Navigate Constraints: Balance technical excellence with real-world pressures: customer deadlines, legacy infrastructure, budget limitations, all while keeping quality high

• Be a Technical Advisor: Explain complex infrastructure decisions to product and engineering teams, provide honest timelines and build trust through transparent communication

• Grow the Practice: As you develop in the role, you will take on more responsibility for shaping how Collabora delivers infrastructure consultancy - mentoring colleagues and leading client engagements

What We're Looking For

Required

Solid Kubernetes experience. You are comfortable operating clusters in production, troubleshooting workload failures, managing networking and storage and navigating unfamiliar configurations independently. You do not need to have seen everything, but you should know how to find your way

Broader infrastructure competence. Kubernetes is not the whole job. You are comfortable working across the platform stack: networking, storage, Linux systems, CI/CD pipelines and observability tooling

Infrastructure as Code mindset. You treat infrastructure configuration as software: version controlled, peer reviewed and repeatable. You are uncomfortable with manual changes to production systems and you can articulate why. Experience with Ansible, Terraform or equivalent tooling is expected

SRE or customer-facing support background. You are comfortable diagnosing and resolving issues reported by clients, often from vague descriptions and limited reproduction steps. You understand that good incident response is as much about communication as it is about technical skill

Consultancy or client-facing technical background. You know how to balance technical excellence with business constraints, manage expectations across multiple projects and advocate for the right solution while respecting customer timelines

Strong English communication skills, both spoken and written, for documentation, incident reports and client discussions

Self-directed work style. You thrive in a remote, asynchronous environment and take ownership of your work without needing close supervision

Nice to Have

• Helm familiarity is useful. We use it regularly on client engagements and you will pick it up quickly if you have not worked with it deeply yet

• Cloud provider experience: AWS, GCP or Azure experience informs good infrastructure decisions; understanding the primitives matters

• CI/CD pipeline experience: GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or equivalent

• Observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry or similar

• Security and compliance awareness: network policy, RBAC, pod security standards or supply chain security tooling

• Scripting and automation: Python, Bash or Go for operational tooling

• Rust: increasingly relevant for infrastructure utilities and systems-level tooling; not a primary requirement but a genuine advantage

• Open source contribution history. We know not every employer makes this easy. Active community participation at any level is valued and we will support you in building that profile as part of the role

What We Offer

Compensation & Benefits

We offer a competitive benefits package tailored to each country in which we have employees, plus a core global benefit offering accessible to all Collaborans. Our core benefits include:

Competitive salary based on experience and location

Office setup budget

Sabbatical/Retention of Services - after five years continuous service

Co-working policy - support for working outside home

Wellness assessments - biannual wellbeing assessments with a trained mental health specialist

Conference attendance - we cover expenses and encourage speaking opportunities

Open source time - contribute to projects you care about

Work Environment

Fully remote - work where you’re most productive

Global team - engineers across Europe, Americas and Asia

No on-call rotations - this isn't support work

Sustainable pace - we're here for the marathon, not the sprint

Flexible hours - manage your own schedule

Growth & Impact

Upstream contributions - your work shapes Linux, not just client products

Technical leadership track - path to principal engineer, subsystem expertise or technical architecture roles

Consulting track - develop deeper client relationships, lead customer engagements or shape service offerings

Mentorship opportunities - both receiving and providing guidance

Conference speaking - we support presentation submissions and provide coaching

Recognition - your contributions are public, building your professional reputation

Culture & Values

Upstream first - we believe the best solutions benefit everyone

Transparency - open discussion about technical decisions, business constraints and project challenges

Pragmatism - perfect is the enemy of good; we ship quality code that solves real problems

Respect for expertise - we trust engineers to make technical decisions

Collaborative - we succeed by working together, internally and with the community

Sustainable pace - we're here for the long haul, not death marches

A Typical Day

No two days are identical but here is a realistic picture of what this role looks like in practice.

Morning

Review overnight alerts for a client platform, triage and resolve or escalate

Pair with a colleague on a tricky networking issue in a client's cluster

Write up findings from yesterday's incident as a post-mortem draft

Midday

Deep work: build out Terraform modules for a new client environment

Quick video call with a client team to walk through your proposed architecture and answer questions

Review a colleague's Helm chart changes before they are applied to staging

Afternoon

Respond to a client query about a deployment failure, diagnose from logs and explain the fix clearly

Update a client on progress, discuss the trade-offs between a fast workaround and a properly engineered solution

Join team meeting to discuss tooling decisions

Write documentation that explains not just what was configured but why

Some days are deep technical work, others involve more client communication. You will balance both based on project needs and your strengths.

Our Interview Process

We respect your time and provide a clear, structured process.

1. Application Review (within 1 week) — we look at your experience, any public work and your screening question responses

2. Initial Chat (30 min) — a casual conversation about your experience and our work

3. Technical Interview (2–3 hours)

4. Technical Deep-Dive — discuss infrastructure architecture, past incidents you have owned and how you approach problem-solving. No whiteboard exercises

5. Infrastructure Review Session — review a real infrastructure configuration or scenario together and discuss the trade-offs

6. Client Scenario Discussion — talk through a realistic customer situation involving technical debt, timeline pressure and competing priorities. We want to see your thought process, not a right answer

7. Head of Open Source Software Consulting  team Discussion (60 min) — ask about day-to-day work and how Collabora operates, discuss compensation and benefits

8. Offer (within 1 week of final interview)

Total timeline: 3–4 weeks from application to offer

What Happens Next

Initial response within 1 week

Even if we do not move forward, we will tell you why

Collabora's Commitment

We are committed to building a diverse team and inclusive environment. We encourage applications from people under-represented in tech.

We evaluate candidates based on skills and contributions, not pedigree. If you are unsure whether you qualify, apply anyway. Imposter syndrome is real and you might be exactly who we are looking for.

We recognise that the combination of deep infrastructure expertise and consulting skills is rare. If you have strong Kubernetes and platform experience and are newer to the consulting side of the role, or vice versa — we want to hear from you. We can develop one if the other is solid.