Lead DevOps Engineer, France

Ridecell; Bordeaux; Hybrid; EUR 92,000 - 111,000; Full time

Job summary

Ridecell is seeking a Lead DevOps Engineer to drive the infrastructure powering AI transformation for European fleet and leasing platforms. The role covers building a robust, scalable platform with GitOps, strong incident response, and security controls.

Based in France with hybrid work, the project spans multiple European countries and involves collaboration with a US-based owner. Start date is December 1, 2026 or January 1, 2027, with a ~6-month term renewable and potential full-time

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering, including lead of production infrastructure.
• Hands-on with production Kubernetes clusters: upgrades, networking, storage, capacity planning, incident recovery.
• Experience building and supporting internal platforms used by application engineering teams.
• Experience carrying a pager, running incident response, and writing postmortems.
• Experience with security compliance (SOC2, threat modeling, penetration testing) in enterprise environments.
• Experience working directly with enterprise IT and security teams.

Responsibilities

• Own production infrastructure and on-call readiness, responding to severity 1 outages outside core hours.
• Re-engineer infrastructure to function as an in-house PaaS to accelerate engineering velocity.
• Standardize GitOps deployment paths and provide self-service for engineering teams.
• Ensure enterprise security and compliance across SOC2 controls and related requirements.
• Support data and AI workloads, including data pipelines, query engines, and self-hosted LLM inference.

Skills

Incident response

Pager leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Self-directed

English proficiency

Education

CS/Engineering degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Kubernetes

AWS

IBM Cloud

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Lead the Infrastructure Powering the AI Transformation of the European Fleet and Leasing Industry

• Rate: 500-600 EUR/day
• Duration: ~6 months, renewable. Preference for candidates interested in converting to full-time employment.
• Start date: December 1st 2026 or January 1st 2027

Project

The project aims to build and operate the platform behind data processing, analysis, and AI systems for large European fleet and leasing businesses. These systems are critical for operational and financial decision-making, processing over 12 million events daily across more than 500,000 managed assets in over 14 countries.

The Lead DevOps Engineer will be responsible for:

• Taking over an existing, stable production infrastructure from its current US-based owner, who stays on as backup and escalation path. Learning it, documenting it, and becoming its primary owner, with mentorship from the hiring manager, who is based in France.
• Being accountable for platform uptime, including responding to severity 1 outages outside core working hours (see On-Call below).
• Re-engineering the infrastructure to function like an “in-house PaaS” to accelerate and scale out engineering velocity. Standardized GitOps deployment paths and self-service for engineering teams, so shipping a new service takes minutes instead of tickets.
• Enterprise security and compliance: SOC2 controls, penetration test remediation, network firewalls, identity and access management, and secure computing requirements from enterprise customers.
• Supporting the data and AI workloads running on the platform: data pipelines, query engines, object storage, and self-hosted LLM inference.

On-Call

This role owns production. Responding to severity 1 outages outside core working hours is a core part of the engagement and a firm requirement.

How it works:

• Off-hours response is for severity 1 outages only (production down or critical customer impact). Everything else waits for business hours.
• The platform serves European businesses only, so on-call covers their working day, roughly 7:00-20:00 Paris time. There are no overnight pages.
• The platform is stable today. The few incidents in recent months were caused by defective changes and resolved by immediate rollback.
• The current US-based owner remains available as backup and escalation path.
• Time spent on an incident outside core hours is taken back from normal working hours. Handle an incident at 19:00 one day, leave work early another day later in the week.
• Compensation is the daily rate only.

Profile

The ideal candidate will have:

• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• A minimum of 5 years of industry experience as a DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineer, including time as the lead or owner of production infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience operating production Kubernetes clusters: upgrades, networking, storage, capacity planning, and incident recovery.
• Experience building and supporting internal platforms used by application engineering teams.
• Experience carrying a pager, running incident response, and writing postmortems.
• Experience with security compliance (SOC2, threat modeling, penetration testing) in enterprise environments.
• Experience working directly with enterprise customers' IT and security teams.

Technologies:

• The platform is primarily in IBM Cloud, however past IBM Cloud experience is not a requirement, it can be learned on the job. High AWS experience is actually preferred instead of IBM.

Soft Skills:

• Excited about working for a startup and moving quickly.
• Treats every off-hours page as a defect to engineer away.
• Also able to liaise with enterprise IT environments: vpc-to-vpc connections, security reviews, firewall change requests, compliance audits, and restrictive access policies.
• Self-directed.
• Comfortable working closely with remote teammates in India (IST), where much of the engineering team sits, including other DevOps engineers.
• Works well with other engineers, a team player, eager to collaborate across functions, able to lead organizational change management in adopting superior engineering practices, and able to provide respectful help and support even to junior developers who may not have any understanding of infrastructure.
• English language proficiency. The working language of Ridecell is English. French is also valuable.

Other Requirements:

• Full-time: 5 days per week (approximately 40 hours).
• Severity 1 incident response outside core working hours, as described in On-Call above.
• Willing to work hybrid (~2 days a week onsite) from offices in Bordeaux (preferred) or Paris during the first 1-2 months of onboarding.