DevOps Engineer

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited vacation

Yearly team offsite

Full work equipment

Budget for AI tools

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a senior DevOps Engineer to own the live game stack, scale Kubernetes clusters, and manage cloud resources with Terraform. You will optimize performance, cost, and reliability for a globally distributed, async team.

Ideal candidates have extensive Kubernetes production experience, PostgreSQL/Redis expertise, and a strong bias toward documentation and automation for self-service infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Senior DevOps experience in production environments.
• Strong Kubernetes expertise including rollouts and autoscaling.
• Proficiency with Terraform and cloud resource management.

Responsibilities

• Own game stack: game, matchmaking and lobby servers on Kubernetes.
• Manage cluster resources as code with Terraform.
• Scale servers with live traffic and optimize cost.
• Ship updates without disrupting live games.
• Maintain fast, cheap data stores: PostgreSQL, Redis, NATS.
• Defend edges with Cloudflare and edge security measures.
• Maintain observability with Sentry and New Relic.
• Document runbooks and decisions for team knowledge.
• Build self-service infrastructure for engineers.
• Root-cause incidents and prevent recurrence.

Skills

Kubernetes

Linux

Docker

CI/CD

Observability

System Design

Async Communication

Performance Tuning

Tools

Terraform

PostgreSQL

Redis

NATS

Sentry

New Relic

Cloudflare

Job description

Wanted: the company 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 the company

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.

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 the company

We strongly adhere to these values in our team - if these resonate, then you'll love working here!

DependabilityWe're self-driven players who deliver without needing supervision. When we commit to something, we make it happen.

OwnershipWe take full responsibility and go beyond our roles to improve the company.

Clear CommunicationIn our remote environment, written communication is key. We're direct, structured, and always keep our team in the loop.

Efficient ExecutionWe move fast and focus on impact. Instead of getting stuck on perfect solutions, we find practical ways forward and get things done.

Continuous LearningWe'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 the company

• 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