Lead DevOps / Platform Engineer gesucht in Leipzig

This is a senior individual contributor role with full ownership. Your mission is to make MAIA's platform reliable, secure, auditable, and developer-friendly, at a stage where every decision you make has lasting impact.

• You take full ownership of our infrastructure and establish the standards that will govern how it grows - Hetzner first, AWS, GCP, and Azure for selected services.
• You own and evolve our CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) and deployment workflows - improving rollout strategies, versioning, and rollback procedures from where they stand today.
• You build out and mature our observability stack (Grafana, Loki, Sentry, PostHog) so that problems surface before customers notice them.
• You implement and own our security fundamentals: IAM, secrets management, TLS, vulnerability scanning, and patch management.
• You drive the technical controls required for our ISO 27001 certification and build the systems that produce auditable evidence continuously.

Technical requirements

• Strong experience running production systems in a SaaS environment.
• Solid understanding of Linux systems and networking fundamentals, containers and reverse proxies and API gateways (e.g., Traefik, Kong).
• Strong security fundamentals: IAM and least privilege, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, and patching.
• Proven experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent), CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar), and observability tooling (Grafana/Loki or similar).
• PostgreSQL operations basics: availability, backup and restore, performance awareness.
• Fluent in English. German is a plus.

Ways of working

• Strong ownership mentality - you take responsibility end-to-end, without needing to be managed.
• People enjoy working with you - not just because of what you know, but because of how you interact with them
• Pragmatic builder - you improve systems without adding unnecessary complexity, and you can defend why a simpler approach was the right call.
• AI is part of how you work - not just as a tool you use, but something you actively explore. You experiment with models, prompts, and workflows, and you have opinions about what actually works.
• You prioritize based on risk and business impact, not technical interest alone.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving startup environment with ambiguity and shifting priorities.
• You communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Experience with ISO 27001 implementation, especially technical controls.
• Experience with NixOS.
• Experience with self-hosted Supabase and Postgres-based platforms.
• Experience with SRE practices: SLOs, error budgets, and incident review culture.
• Familiarity with multi-cloud usage patterns (Hetzner, AWS, Azure, GCP).

You will be the single owner of platform engineering at a well-funded, fast-growing startup - building the discipline from the ground up with the trust and autonomy to do it right.

• Short decision-making paths, real ownership, and a team that trusts you to lead your area without being managed.
• Direct and lasting impact on product reliability, security posture, and company growth.
• Flexible working hours and fully remote.
• Access to a WellPass fitness membership for your physical and mental wellbeing.
• Competitive salary of 70,000 - 80,000 EUR and VSOP (Virtual Stock Option Plan) participation opportunities.

We are a remote-first company and have been since day one. Most of our team is based in Leipzig, but remote team members are a natural part of how we work - not an exception. We do bring the full team together in Leipzig, or somewhere else, a few times a year for team events and planning sessions, with all travel and accommodation costs covered.

If you are somewhere in Germany you are in scope.

MAIA is the AI platform built for industrial companies - where generic AI tools break down because the data is complex, the stakes are high, and precision actually matters. We focus on the hard problems: integrating with real engineering workflows, understanding complex technical documents, and turning implicit organizational knowledge into something the whole company can build on. Our goal is to become the leading AI knowledge management platform for industrial companies in Europe - built for the companies that shape the physical world. Until now, platform engineering at MAIA has been handled by our engineers and our founder alongside their other responsibilities. That has taken us far, but we are at the point where it can no longer be done on the side. You will be the first person who owns this area entirely. Not starting from zero, but raising what we have to the next level. How you deploy, observe, secure, and audit our systems will shape how MAIA operates for years to come.