Systems & IT Engineer (w/m/d) 80-100%

About Papers

Papers is a software engineering company founded on high-tech talent. We support the full lifecycle of innovative web3 products — from concept to software market fit — building secure, scalable futures for our clients and the internet at large.

With over a decade of experience and a reputation built on delivering for Fortune 500s and blockchain ecosystems, our teams combine deep technical know-how with a mission to enable meaningful, decentralized innovation.

As an engineering-driven team, we work with autonomy and purpose. Our culture is built on meritocracy, long-term thinking, and a commitment to quality over buzz. We aim to collaborate with people who love tech for its own sake and want to help shape the future by solving real-world challenges.

Tasks

Your Responsibilities

• Manage and improve our self-hosted, Linux-based infrastructure (Ubuntu) running on a fleet of dedicated/bare-metal servers
• Keep servers patched and up to date (OS/security updates, reboots) and maintain the various applications we self-host
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI): build images, push to the GitLab Container Registry
• Set up and optimize Docker and Docker Compose deployments
• Automate infrastructure and host provisioning with Ansible
• Define and enforce backup strategies and disaster-recovery processes.
• Run our observability stack — Telegraf + InfluxDB + Grafana for metrics and alerting (alerts route to Teams/PagerDuty), Graylog for log aggregation — and write runbooks for the alerts
• Administer Microsoft 365 / Entra ID (Azure AD) — identity & access management, MFA, Conditional Access, SSO, and email/collaboration security
• Own and continuously improve our security posture: SSH/host hardening, firewalls, secrets management, least-privilege access, periodic access reviews, and incident response
• Participate in on-call rotations to support critical services (incl. the Acurast blockchain/bridge infrastructure)
• Collaborate with backend engineers to streamline integration and delivery
• Continuously identify and automate repetitive tasks to reduce manual intervention

Tech Stack Overview

You'll be working with:

• Linux (Ubuntu), bare-metal/dedicated hosts
• GitLab CI, Docker, Docker Compose
• Ansible (infrastructure-as-code)
• Nginx, Let's Encrypt/certbot
• Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana (metrics + alerting); Graylog (logs), PagerDuty
• PostgreSQL, NATS, NetBird (mesh VPN)
• Microsoft 365 / Entra ID (Azure AD) — identity, MFA, Conditional Access
• Scripting: Bash, Python

Requirements

Your Profile

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure roles
• Proficient with Linux/Ubuntu system administration on self-managed servers
• Comfortable with Docker / Docker Compose and CI/CD workflows (GitLab CI)
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Ansible especially)
• Confident with Nginx, TLS, shell scripting, and practical networking (reverse proxies, firewalls, VPN/overlay networks)
• Comfortable owning a metrics/alerting stack and responding to incidents
• Solid grasp of security fundamentals: identity & access management (MFA/SSO, least privilege), host hardening, secrets handling, and patch management
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English
• Self-driven, self-organized, pragmatic, and comfortable working independently

Benefits

Bonus if you have:

• Background in blockchain/web3 infrastructure (we run Acurast network and bridge services)
• Microsoft 365 / Entra ID administration (Conditional Access, Intune, Defender)
• Deeper security background: hardening, vulnerability/patch management, or a security certification
• Experience operating a TIG stack (Telegraf/InfluxDB/Grafana) or other time-series monitoring
• Managed-cloud experience (GCP/AWS/Azure) and Kubernetes/Helm
• Terraform or other declarative IaC (transferable to our Ansible setup)
• Contributions to open-source projects
• Experience scaling infrastructure in startup or high-growth environments

Why join Papers?

• 🧠 Work with cutting-edge web3 clients and technology.
• 🏖️ 25 days paid vacation per year.
• 💻 2 days of home office per week possible
• 🤝 High ownership, low bureaucracy — your voice matters.
• 🛠️ Influence the DevOps strategy from day one.
• 🎉 Regular team events and retreats when possible.
• 📚 Learning and development supported.