## About Us
Smirnov Labs is a fast-growing engineering company founded by an ex-Googler. We help product teams launch and scale quickly by leveraging modern technology and AI-assisted development.
Our projects are diverse — we partner with clients at the earliest stages and own the technical delivery end-to-end.
We're a small, senior-heavy team where every engineer has real impact. No bureaucracy, no hand-holding — just sharp people shipping fast.
This is an outstaff role: you'll be embedded directly with a client's engineering team as part of our delivery group.
## The Role
The infrastructure runs across two clouds — GCP for the managed services and everything that benefits from them, DigitalOcean where simpler, cheaper compute does the job just as well. You'll own both sides of that, and the decisions about what belongs where.
This is a hands-on role on a small team. There's no platform group above you and no one else on call — you build the infrastructure, you automate it, and you're the one who understands it when something goes wrong at an inconvenient hour.
## What You'll Do
- Own the infrastructure across GCP and DigitalOcean — provisioning, networking, scaling, and the cost of all of it.
- Define everything in code. Terraform for infrastructure, no hand-clicked resources that nobody can reproduce.
- Build and maintain CI/CD so engineers ship their own work — fast pipelines, safe rollouts, quick rollbacks.
- Run containerised workloads: Docker, Kubernetes (GKE and DOKS), and the judgement to know when a managed service or a plain VM is the better answer.
- Own observability — metrics, logs, traces, and alerts that fire on real problems rather than on noise.
- Keep Postgres healthy in production: backups, restores you've actually tested, connection pooling, upgrades.
- Harden the platform: IAM and least privilege, secrets management, network boundaries, patching.
- Plan for failure — backups, disaster recovery, incident response, and honest postmortems.
- Watch the bill. Right-size what's running, and move workloads between clouds when the economics say so.
- Work directly with the client's engineering team, and make their path to production shorter than it is today.
- Use AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) as part of your daily workflow.
## What We're Looking For
- 5+ years running production infrastructure, with real on-call experience behind you
- Strong hands-on GCP: GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, IAM, VPC and networking, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Secret Manager
- Hands-on DigitalOcean: Droplets, managed Kubernetes and Postgres, Spaces, load balancers, VPC
- Terraform at a level where you own modules and state, not just apply someone else's
- Solid Kubernetes: deployments, ingress, autoscaling, resource limits, and debugging a pod that won't start
- Strong Linux and networking fundamentals — DNS, TLS, load balancing, firewalls
- CI/CD pipelines you've built and maintained yourself (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Cloud Build, or similar)
- Scripting in Python, Go, or Bash — enough to automate rather than repeat
- Observability in practice: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or the equivalent, wired up by you
- Production Postgres operations: backups, restores, performance, upgrades
- A security instinct — least privilege by default, secrets never in the repo
- A track record of shipping without a detailed spec and without process handed to you
- Comfort working in the US timezone (overlapping working hours required)
- Upper-Intermediate or higher English
- Ability to own and drive work independently with minimal supervision
Nice to have
- Multi-cloud or migration experience — moving workloads between providers and living with the result
- Serious cost optimisation work, with numbers you can point to
- Infrastructure for AI workloads: GPU nodes, vector databases, inference serving
- Compliance exposure (SOC 2, ISO 27001) and the controls that come with it
- Early-stage or agency background: greenfield work, shifting requirements, direct client contact
## What We Offer
- Competitive salary above market average
- Fully remote work
- Flat structure — work directly with the client's engineering team, no middle management
- Real technical ownership: you make the architecture decisions on the infrastructure you build
- Diverse and technically challenging projects
- Modern AI-powered development workflow
- Small team culture — your voice matters, your code ships
- Paid vacation and sick leave
- Flexible schedule within the US timezone overlap
- Professional and career growth through real ownership, not courses and certificates
## How to Apply
Send your CV with a brief note about the worst production incident you've handled — what broke, how you found it, and what you changed so it couldn't happen again.