Wanted: Colonist DevOps Engineer

Working Hours: We work asynchronously and value outcomes over hours

Location: Fully Remote

Compensation: Paid in USD. Negotiable based on experience and location

About Colonist

We're building the biggest digital board game platform on the internet. Players start 250k games every day. Last year: 60M games, 3,037 years of play. 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

Most apps scale by splitting users apart. We can't. Players share one live game state. Every lag spike is felt mid-game. One viral video can 10x our traffic overnight. Your job: absorb 50k CCU without dropping a single game.

You will own the infrastructure behind every game session: clusters, deploys, databases, the edge, and the path from merge to production. You will make our infra knowledge shared, so no system depends on one person.

What You'll Do

• Own the stack behind every game: game, matchmaking and lobby servers on Kubernetes

• Manage cluster and cloud resources as code in Terraform

• Scale servers up and down with live traffic. Pay for players, not idle machines

• Ship updates often, without kicking players out of live games

• Keep terabytes of game data and replays fast and cheap. PostgreSQL, Redis, NATS under real load

• Defend the edge from bots and attacks. Cloudflare, rate limiting, Turnstile, R2.

• Own observability across Sentry and New Relic. Consolidate monitoring and close the gaps

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

• Build self-service paths so other engineers use infrastructure confidently.

• When something breaks, thousands notice in seconds. Find the root cause. Make it never recur

Requirements

• You love hard technical problems. Scale, latency and cost excite you

• You have senior-level experience in DevOps

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

• You run infra lean. You optimize before adding hardware

• You document as you go. Runbooks and decisions are natural outputs of your work.

• 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 learn a system from its code, configs and monitoring.

• 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

• You've run real-time or multiplayer systems where shared state matters.

• 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

• We have hard problems, most engineers only read about: live shared state, viral spikes, lean scale

• 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