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
Colonist is building the largest digital board game platform on the internet, where players start 250,000 games daily and collectively played 60 million games last year totaling 3,037 years of play. The platform handles massive real-time multiplayer game sessions where players share live game state, requiring sophisticated infrastructure to support rapid scaling and zero tolerance for latency or dropped games. The company operates as a fully remote, asynchronous team spread across multiple continents, focused on creating extremely polished digital board game experiences that players love.
