Specialist System Engineer for DNS and Observability team (hybrid)

Join Our Team of Infrastructure Experts and Shape the Future of Our Services:

The TechOps DNS & Observability team at IONOS operates critical infrastructure components essential for the reliability of services across the IONOS Group and its brands (IONOS, IONOS Cloud, Arsys, Fasthosts, united-domains, InterNetX, Strato, Cronon, World4You, we22, home.pl). We work under NIS2 and ISO 27001 obligations — these are not optional quality standards, they are the floor we build on.

Our Observability squad runs the systems that tell the rest of the company what is going on:

• CAMS (Central Alert Management System, in-house) — the single pane of glass that consolidates alerts from 70+ source monitoring systems across the group.
• Patch Management and Reporting (PMR) — group-wide RPM/DEB inventory and patch status; in-house, KRITIS-relevant.
• Vulnerability Management — operating the Tenable Security Center with a 70 000-server license footprint across the group.
• Atlassian platform operations — we run the OS underneath the Jira (12 000 user licenses) and Confluence (4 000 user licenses) instances and collaborate closely with Service Management on the application layer.
• Splunk OS operations in close collaboration with TechSec.
• Nazara monitoring-as-a-service, Harbor container registry, Statistics (metric collection for 21 tenants), OpenSearch/Kafka/Cassandra/Grafana stacks, suricata IDS/IPS.

We are a multinational team — from Seville in the west to Bucharest in the east — with the team lead based in Karlsruhe.

Our tools and Methodologies:

• We use Puppet as our configuration management system; experience with Ansible, CFEngine or Salt is welcome.
• We believe in measuring everything. You'll work with our observability stacks (collectd/telegraf, Metrictank → moving to VictoriaMetrics/ClickHouse, ELK, Grafana, Icinga2) and help shape the Statistics 3.0 migration.
• We use iBGP, eBGP, anycast routing, and ECMP for high availability and efficient traffic management.
• Familiarity with databases, messaging, and metric systems (Apache Kafka, ClickHouse, Apache Cassandra, Metrictank, Mimir) is a plus.
• AI is a serious lever for us, not a buzzword. We use AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor) to speed up and improve our systems engineering.
• We work in two clearly separated zones: AI-assisted IaC development (agent reads, writes, opens PRs — no production access) and rollout (human-gated, blast-radius-bounded, with explicit approvals for destructive operations). The gate between them is not negotiable.

Main responsibilities:

• Collaborate with the squad to design, develop, and operate highly-available services on Linux, ensuring seamless integration with operational and product requirements.
• Take ownership of the full stack — from hardware to application, including configuration management and monitoring — and drive continuous improvement.
• Contribute to our open-source projects, such as DIM (github.com/ionos-cloud/dim) and monzero (github.com/ionos-cloud/monzero), and help shape the future of our infrastructure.
• Apply rigorous blast-radius and risk assessment to every change you propose, especially when AI tooling is in the loop. This is part of the job, not an afterthought.
• Participate in an on-call service rotation, ensuring the smooth operation of our complex infrastructure.

We appreciate:

• A completed computer science degree or equivalent qualification.
• 3+ years of practical experience administering 100+ Linux systems (Debian/CentOS/EL) across 3+ data centers.
• Experience with monitoring, configuration, VCS, and visualization tools (Icinga2, Puppet, Ansible, git, Grafana).
• Understanding of modern software architectures and their deployment (REST, microservices, Docker, CI/CD).
• Knowledge of network and infrastructure services (DNS, BGP, VLANs, firewalling, IPv6).
• Scripting/programming knowledge (bash, Python, Go, Java, etc.).
• Experience with AI-assisted infrastructure development (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor or similar) — including the lessons learned. We explicitly welcome candidates who have seen AI tooling cause data loss, accidental destruction or production incidents in operational systems. Those experiences are valuable. We are not looking for people who treat AI as a magic wand, and we are not looking for people who refuse to engage with it. We are looking for people who have skin in the game and have learned to reason about blast radius before they hit enter.
• Excellent communication skills in English (German is a plus).

What we offer:

• Access to local/international trainings, development and growth opportunities, including access to e-learning platforms, covering both technical and soft skills areas; 
• Modern technologies, product responsibility; 
• Flexible work schedule; 
• Hybrid work option; 
• Medical services package from one of two private providers; 
• 25 vacation days per year; 
• Substitute days off for public holidays that occur on the weekend; 
• Meal tickets; 
• Internal referral program; 
• Employee anniversary program;
• Team events, networking events organized to promote a passionate, creative and diverse culture; 
• Summerfest and Winterfest parties; 
• Of course, coffee, soft drinks and fresh fruits are on us in the office.