Linux/Kubernetes System Engineer
Transatel is a global provider of cellular connectivity solutions and the #1 aggregator of alternative mobile operator MVNOs in Europe. What if you connected the world, beyond borders?
The Context In a context of very strong growth in volumes to be processed (multiplication by 10 by 2030), Transatel is looking to strengthen its technical teams with experienced profiles to accelerate an ongoing migration to Kubernetes, to lead the redesign of observability tools, as well as the complete automation of integration and deployment pipelines. The technical environment is technologically rich, with very high high-availability requirements, on a fleet of more than 2000 physical and virtual servers, which support approximately 100 IT applications and 50 types of telecom components, to provide our high-criticality services to our customers.
The Team Within our DTSI (Direction Télécom et Systèmes d’Information), you will report to the Infrastructure Manager. Having joined at the end of 2023, he has more than 20 years of experience in building and managing critical infrastructures and almost as much in managing Infrastructure build and run teams, in web and telecom contexts. He leads a team of about a dozen people across the Systems, Databases, and Monitoring perimeters. Each of these three poles includes a technical leader, responsible for the consistency and relevance of our technical choices. The other infrastructure engineers in the teams participate in the think/build/run on their respective perimeters. The team organization aims to be agile, relying on autonomous and responsible individuals. Mutual aid and knowledge sharing are important drivers for the evolution of the team and individuals.
Your Mission System engineers are responsible for the build and run of all operating systems for physical and virtual servers, our Kubernetes clusters, and a set of middleware-type components (HTTP proxies/reverse proxies, rabbitMQ, web servers, ...). On the build side, they increasingly rely on an Infrastructure as Code approach using Ansible and Kubernetes. In run, they are guarantors of maintaining the operational condition of this same perimeter, covering both production and other environments (integration, pre-production...). In a DevOps spirit, they participate alongside development teams in the evolution of our IT platforms (client backoffice and management systems) and collaborate with telecom build teams on the integration of solutions from our software and hardware operator brick suppliers. Finally, they support and accompany the skill development of the Operations teams in their perimeter. They also provide on-call support for the systems they are responsible for. You are therefore attached to the Systems team, as a Senior member of this team. You propose and take charge of projects to evolve our infrastructures, in connection with our Tech Lead. Here are some examples of projects engaged at the beginning of this year: Observability: generalization of Prometheus, switch from InfluxDB to Mimir, generalization of our ELK platforms;
Kubernetes: Evolution of our on premise clusters (replacement of the CNI in particular), implementation of security policies, switching middlewares to our Kubernetes clusters or application migration, in connection with the development teams.
You participate in daily operations as well as on-call duties alongside other team members. Through your seniority, you participate in the continuous improvement of service quality, processes, and rituals and support the more junior members of the team.
Your Profile At an Engineer level, you have more than 10 years of experience in similar positions (Sysadmin, SRE, DevOps, platform engineer...), ideally in environments with very high availability constraints. You have at least 5 years of experience as a Linux system engineer and you no longer consider working without Ansible, git, Jenkins/gitlab-ci ... (and other Infrastructure as Code tools). You are familiar with on premise environments in their hardware (x86), systems (Linux, mainly Debian and a pinch of Windows), and virtualization (Xen and marginally VMWare) dimensions and your goal is to make them easier to use for developers than the cloud, in a Platform Engineering approach. You know Kubernetes, both in its use and in cluster operation (bonus: you have already operated an on premise cluster). You have already operated middleware and/or application servers (Apache, RabbitMQ, Kafka, ...), if possible in a Web context. Bonus: you have an attraction to observability and experience in their deployment: Monitoring with Prometheus / Grafana, log management with ELK /EFK, ... Bonus: you have an interest in security and its implementation at the Linux or Kubernetes system level: identity and access management (FreeIPA), secrets management (Vault, Kubernetes), Network Policies in Kubernetes, ...
Conditions for Success You are curious, eager to solve concrete problems by contributing to a long-term vision of the evolution of on premise infrastructures based on Kubernetes. You know how to navigate in complex technical contexts that sometimes lack documentation in order to rationalize and simplify the existing, or even modernize it. You appreciate teamwork, the transmission of your knowledge to your peers, and particularly to the most junior ones. You speak technical English which allows you to collaborate on all types of projects with our many non-French speaking colleagues (more than 35 nationalities represented).
If you have made it to the bottom of this offer, it would be a shame to postpone your application, apply!