Navy Seal DevOps Engineer

Full-time, Warsaw onsite ~50%, offsite events incl. International quarterly.

In 2025, Cere is on a path to automate data computation by scaling to thousands of distributed data clusters spanning millions of nodes around the world.

We seek a level-headed, “Navy Seal” type DevOps engineer to help us accelerate this.

Ownership: Take pride in end-to-end ownership and full accountability.

Ambition: We expect you to grow fast, both as an Individual Contributor and the business domain owner.

Intellectual honesty: Our DNA is to be Socratic and think from first principles.

Proactive communicator: We prefer to ask up front instead of second-guessing.

In addition to client-side SDKs and self-hosted components, Cere maintains four stacks that require DevOps:

- Decentralized Data Clusters (DDCs), self-hosted, in-house and community-run nodes.

- Emerging Ambient AI Clusters, on-prem private DDCs with AI capabilities.

- The $CERE blockchain automates these data clusters by providing security and utility to them. blockchain validators.

- And some auxiliary tools expanding from the core team to the dev community.

- DDC nodes (1) are based on docker-compose files. Minor challenges: self-healing, observability, discovery. Major challenges: the zero-downtime upgrade protocol.

- AI clusters (2) leverage Kubernetes to orchestrate secure data computing services on top of the DDC clusters.  instances. Minor challenges: reproducibility, blue/green deployments. Major challenges: private on-prem.

- The blockchain (3) is out of scope of the DevOps position we are hiring for now. It is instrumental to understand the interplay between chain-decentralized, data-community-centralized, and AI-semi-private parts of the stack. The desire to dive deeper into Web3 is a big plus, but not a hard requirement for the DevOps candidate as of late 2024.

- The auxiliary tools (4) are centralized and rather standard, think of them as EC2- and Hetzner-deployed HAProxy instances, as well as traditional Web apps.

- Has worked with founders closely, or was a founder before, and has scaled robust and big distributed systems.

- Understands infra run costs, R&D costs, and opportunity costs well.

- Prioritizes hard-earned knowledge over showing off with numbers.

- Enjoys on- and off-site events when we get the team together and work face to face.

Base Pay: We offer a market-competitive salary based on your experience and expertise.

Token Grants: In addition to your salary, we provide grants in $CERE tokens.

Customized Benefits: We are flexible in our offers and open to personalization, feel free to ask.

Cere is a leading Web3 company backed by Binance Labs, Republic Labs, and Polygon.

Cere powers data projects in a decentralized way. This includes storage (“S3”), streaming (“Cloudflare”), and AI workflows (“Databricks”), all in their own flavor of blending standard solutions with decentralization.

The unique value proposition is that our decentralized data clusters are federated by the blockchain but are operational as individual self-contained sets of nodes by design. This dramatically reduces the load on the blockchain, enabling massive scalability. The role of the blockchain is in providing security and utility, by enabling referendum-based community-controlled organic growth of the network.

The Cere token thus has the intrinsic value in that it is in $CERE that developers and end users need to pay to store data, stream data, and run AI workflows over the data. This positions Cere above the vast majority of Web3 products, setting the stage for massive growth. 

The Cere team is split between Silicon Valley and Berlin/Warsaw (where we are growing the engineering team).

For more info, see: www.cere.network