Senior System Engineer - DevOps

Hybrid: From home and our office at Amsterdam Central Station

Salary: Between EUR 60,000 and EUR 70,000 plus excellent secondary benefits (see below)

Full-time: 37.5 hours per week (working part-time is also possible)

IMPORTANT: You should be living in the Netherlands

We are a highly collaborative, international IT Engineering team looking for a new colleague to join our team. You will be part of a unique, not-for-profit organisation that has a significant impact on the core of the Internet. If you are passionate about engineering, Infrastructure As Code, and enjoy working with Kubernetes and the cloud, then this is the job for you.

We value collaboration and technical expertise, and we use a wide variety of technologies, both in the cloud and on-premises, including Linux, AWS, Kubernetes (EKS and EKS-Anywhere), Helm, Terraform, GitLab, ArgoCD, VictoriaMetrics (Prometheus), OpenSearch, VMware, Netapp, F5, Juniper and SaltStack.

🧠What you will be doing:

You will join us in a transformation process involving containerisation and migration of existing applications to Kubernetes. Besides maintaining both on-prem and cloud services, you will also:

• Promote the use of DevOps practices, containerisation and Kubernetes to your colleagues

• Deploy and maintain Kubernetes clusters (EKS and EKS Anywhere)

• Build, deploy and migrate (to) containerised applications using ArgoCD

• Maintain Linux-based systems (Redhat-based)

• After six months in the IT department, you will be expected to participate in our 24/7 standby rotation - shifts are one week every 6-8 weeks (compensated on top of your salary)

• You might need to travel 2-3 times a year to attend training courses and support conferences like RIPE Meetings

👀What we're looking for:

• At least five years of experience working in a similar environment as a DevOps engineer on Linux

• A great understanding of DevOps practices (CI/CD) and an Agile mindset

• Experience building, maintaining and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters

• Experience with AWS, EKS in particular.

• Experience with Infrastructure As Code (Terraform, Ansible, etc.)

And essentially:

• Communication: Strong written and spoken English

• Embracing change: Eagerness to keep learning and a willingness to adapt

• Team player: Strong interpersonal and collaborative skills

• A modern, flexible and informal work environment with an emphasis on a healthy work/life balance

• Flexible work-from-home policy, so you can arrange your weekly office and 'working from home' days in a way that works for you. Working from abroad for a limited number of days per year is also possible.

• An annual salary between EUR 60,000 and EUR 70,000 (before tax). This includes the standard 8% annual “holiday pay”.

• Attractive additional compensation for the 24/7 standby rotation shifts

• Excellent secondary benefits: 5% end-of-year allowance, annual budgets for health, transportation and technology purposes, non-contributory pension scheme, paid parental leave, top-tier health insurance coverage for you and your family and 33 vacation days (full-time 37.5 hours)

• A generous training budget each year that can be used for professional development

• An in-house free barista providing healthy varied lunches on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and nice breakfasts on Thursdays, plus regular office drinks

• Delightful team events such as: Team outings, Christmas party and a summer BBQ

👥The IT Engineering team

We are an international team of 11 highly motivated engineers who love our craft. We are responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure for most of the RIPE NCC's services. We work in an Agile environment and rely on good communication and collaboration within our team and organisation. 

🛜About the RIPE NCC

The RIPE NCC is a not-for-profit organisation founded on the belief that the Internet should be governed openly, transparently and together with the wider Internet community. We are one of the oldest Internet organisations in Europe and are proud of our legacy.

Our strength is our staff. We bring together more than 180 people from over 40 countries in our modern, vibrant office in the east wing of Amsterdam Central Station. Currently, we have a hybrid way of working and allow our staff to work from their homes and the office. Our official working language is English, but our colleagues speak more than 30 languages.

Our backgrounds are diverse, but our goal is the same: we work for the good of the Internet. Will you join us?

📋How to apply

If interested, please click the ‘Apply’ button and submit your CV and cover letter in English. Adding a cover letter is highly important and appreciated, our team read them carefully.

Not ready to apply yet? Then send me an email to openings@ripe.net and we can have an informal chat.

At the RIPE NCC, we are proud to serve our members and the RIPE community in 76 countries across Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. We celebrate unique perspectives and talents from different backgrounds and cultures. So if you're passionate about what you do and want to help shape the future of the Internet, apply now - we'd love to hear your story.

Please note that due to the nature of our activities, we will require successful candidates to follow a pre-employment screening (conducted by our partner Validata). This involves requesting a criminal record and education certificates.

MEET THE TEAM:

Marco van Tol has been a Systems Engineer with the RIPE NCC for 11 years. He sat down with us to share his experience working at the RIPE NCC.

Q: What do you love the most about working at the RIPE NCC?
MvT: Working with a group of people that have been working to improve the Internet for quite some time. My first job directly related to the Internet was at an Internet provider called Demon Internet, also in the centre of Amsterdam. It was in that environment where I grew really fond of working with people who have very specific knowledge about the Internet. Working for the RIPE NCC gives me that same feeling.

Q: What is the culture of your team?
MvT: I think we fit more than one type. People First seems to fit, as we have excellent work resources and secondary benefits. High Performance seems to fit, as we invest a lot of resources and energy into deploying the best possible results. Collaborative also seems to fit, as we work together a lot on projects.

Q: What do you love the most about your job at the RIPE NCC?
MvT: Recently, I became a Specialist Systems Engineer. I’m more of a technical person than a manager-type person, and this role fits that perfectly. The upcoming project I’m expecting to work on is migrating services from servers in our data centre to services in the cloud. During that process, we also need to convert the services to make optimal use of the features offered by cloud providers. This is something that I expect to be a lot of fun.

Q: What did you do in the last team outing?
MvT: We went karting at an indoor kart venue. It was great!