Principal DevOps Engineer

Join us as a Principal DevOps Engineer and own the cloud platform behind our intelligence systems. Datenna is a fast-growing tech scale-up combining open-source intelligence (OSINT) and AI to give governments worldwide critical insights into China's techno-economic landscape. Our platform transforms OSINT into actionable insights on China's Defense Industrial Base and broader technological ecosystem.

The Role: You join a small, senior infrastructure team to design, build and operate the Azure platform underneath our full data chain: acquisition, processing and consumption. You'll own our infrastructure as code, run our Kubernetes clusters, and build the automation and observability that keep everything reliable and secure, working closely with the other engineering teams who build on the platform. This is a high-ownership role: you build it, you run it.

It's a broad role, not a narrow one: the real challenge is range and judgment across the whole platform — networking, Kubernetes, data stores, CI/CD and security — with a lot of autonomy and genuine ownership of the decisions, not just the tasks. We hold a high security bar because we think it's the right way to build, not because anyone requires it of us. You'll thrive if you like owning the full picture and making the call, and it won't suit you if you'd rather go deep on one slice with a big team around you.

Your Mission at Datenna:

• The Azure platform end to end — built in code with Pulumi (Python), running our Kubernetes (AKS) clusters. You own how it's designed, deployed and operated.
• Private-by-default networking — secure-by-design hub-spoke networking, where nothing is exposed that doesn't need to be.
• Reliability and observability — operate our LGTM stack (Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo), and turn alert noise and blind spots into actionable signal and calm incident response.
• The data infrastructure under the platform — Neo4j, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch and Kafka: backup/restore, upgrades, performance and incident readiness, not just keeping the lights on.
• The infrastructure for our AI and data workloads — Databricks, the OSINT data pipeline, and the compute behind our AI and model work.
  

What makes you a great candidate:

• Senior-level experience owning production infrastructure, SRE, DevOps or platform systems end to end.
• Strong Azure depth: networking, compute, storage and security services.
• Infrastructure-as-Code, ideally with Pulumi (Terraform is fine too). Python development experience is a big plus.
• Solid hands-on Kubernetes experience (we use AKS).
• Solid networking fundamentals: private networking, DNS, load balancing, peering, network security.
• Practical observability and incident-response experience.
• Comfortable with on-call responsibilities.
• You work AI-first. Agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex) are already part of how you work, and you use them with the judgment to verify output and own what ships.
• Strong autonomy and written communication, comfortable as a broad owner in a small senior team.

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated, defense, intelligence, fintech or other high-trust environments.
• Hands-on with Neo4j, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Kafka or data-platform operations.
• Grafana LGTM, OpenTelemetry, SLOs or alert-noise reduction.
• Policy-as-code, workload identity, Key Vault or secrets management.

AI is part of how we build

We use AI tools extensively to move faster and raise quality, and we focus our human attention on the work where judgment, creativity, and responsibility matter most. We expect every candidate to be comfortable using AI in their day-to-day work in a responsible manner and to continuously look for better ways to apply it.

Please know that applicants may be subject to a screening process.

• Work on globally impactful projects in geopolitical intelligence
• Lead innovation in OSINT and AI technologies
• Competitive compensation and benefits
• Dynamic, international team environment
• Significant growth opportunities in a scale-up

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