Who we are

Ilkari is a privately-held start-up based in Dublin, Ireland. We deliver hyper-private scale innovation and technology to safeguard and secure data, enabling true data sovereignty even as the pace of change accelerates. Our best-in-breed sovereign technology delivers privacy and control over where companies’ data resides, where it flows, and how it’s accessed.

We’re here to rewrite the story of data sovereignty – empowering innovators, pioneers and visionaries to make their mark. We believe the sky is not the limit. We strive for the perfect balance of simplicity and excellence in everything we do, and we’re looking for people who are ready to join our journey and rewrite the story of data sovereignty.

Role overview

We’re looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to join our Engineering team and take a lead role in building and operating the infrastructure that underpins our products and services. You’ll focus on delivering secure, reliable, and scalable platforms, with a strong emphasis on OpenStack, to support our sovereign cloud strategy and meet customer expectations.

This role is critical to supporting our business goals — enabling faster delivery of features, improving system uptime, and reducing operational risk. You’ll be responsible for designing, automating, and optimising our platform stacks, while working closely with engineering, product, and operations teams to reduce technical debt, improve maintainability, and ensure our infrastructure is ready to scale with the business.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and maintain highly available and scalable infrastructure platforms, with a core focus on Proxmox and OpenStack-based environments.
• Drive adoption of Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible) and GitOps practices across infrastructure operations.
• Lead automation of infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and system maintenance processes.
• Own observability across the platform — logging, monitoring, alerting, and performance tuning.
• Collaborate with network, security, product, and operations teams to deliver integrated, production-ready infrastructure.
• Evaluate and maintain platform components to ensure they meet performance, compliance, and availability standards.
• Conduct architectural reviews, lead incident response retrospectives, and drive continuous improvements in system reliability.
• Participate in and potentially lead the on-call escalation process for critical incidents.

What are we looking for

Technical Skills

• Proven, hands-on experience operating and maintaining OpenStack & Proxmox in production environments.
• Hands-on experience with Ceph storage - deployment, tuning, and operational maintenance.
• In-depth experience with Linux systems administration, performance tuning, and hardening.
• Strong proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code using tools such as Terraform and Ansible.
• Expert-level scripting and automation skills (e.g., Python, Bash, or similar).
• Familiarity with observability stacks such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or Datadog.
• Strong understanding of core networking concepts such as TCP/IP, DNS, Routing protocols and load balancing strategies.
• Experience integrating infrastructure workflows with CI/CD systems (e.g., GitLab CI, ArgoCD).
• Understanding of cloud security principles and compliance.
• Comfortable managing and optimising SQL and NoSQL databases in infrastructure contexts.

Soft Skills

• Very good problem-solving skills, open mind towards suggestions, can-do attitude, and agile mindset.
• Self-motivated and self-managing, with excellent organisational skills.
• Clear communication, documentation, and cross-team collaboration skills.

Experience

• 6+ years in Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or DevOps roles.

What's in it for you (Spain)

• Private life and health insurance for you and your family.
• Four weeks per year to work from anywhere for eligible employees.
• Gym reimbursement.
• Company bus line for convenient transportation applicable for employees Málaga based.
• Learning Pocket for personal development.
• A hybrid working model with flexible hours.
• 3 volunteering paid days each year.
• Generous referral bonus programme.