Infrastructure/Systems Engineer
Orcrist Technologies is seeking an Infrastructure Engineer to design, build, and operate bare-metal server fleets and data-center networking for their high-performance data intelligence platform. The role involves hands-on hardware commissioning, automation, and supporting GPU-based inference in both on-prem and air-gapped environments.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Hybrid / Berlin
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years in bare-metal, data-center, or systems infrastructure engineering
- Strong bare-metal Linux (Ubuntu, RKE2, Talos, or similar) skills
- Experience with infrastructure automation (Ansible, Terraform, or equivalent)
- Solid, current data-center networking fundamentals: L2/L3, IP Fabric, BGP, and switching
- Comfortable operating in air-gapped or on-prem environments and traveling to customer sites
- Practical hardware sizing literacy: power budgets, thermal/cooling, UPS sizing, and rack integration
- Eligible to work in Germany
Nice to have
- German language (B1+)
- Exposure to regulated or security-critical environments
- NVIDIA GPU stack knowledge
- Kubernetes bare-metal fundamentals
- Inference optimization and familiarity with switch NOS
Full description
Orcrist is building a next generation data intelligence platform using cutting-edge technologies. We're handling petabyte-scale data with sub-second queries. Our product is a Kubernetes‑based platform delivered as B2B SaaS or as a self‑hosted on‑prem solution, including air‑gapped deployments. We enable customers across defense, law enforcement, and enterprise to turn mission-critical data into actionable intelligence.
Role
You'll own the layer everything else runs on: bare-metal servers, operating systems, data-center networking, and storage across on-prem and fully air-gapped sites — the physical and infrastructure foundation our platform and GPU fleets are built on. You design, build, and operate server fleets with a strong automation and DevOps mindset, then partner with our SRE, MLOps, and ML teams to ensure everything running above the metal — including GPU inference — performs reliably at scale. Some of this work is hands-on at customer sites, where you size, rack, and commission self-contained server environments with no internet uplink.
We weight depth in modern data-center infrastructure, networking, and automation more heavily than GPU-specific experience. A strong infrastructure and network engineer with a genuine automation mindset — even without prior GPU exposure — is a better fit for this role than a candidate with GPU expertise whose networking background is rooted in legacy, corporate-style L2 designs.
What you'll do
- Design, size, provision, and operate bare-metal server fleets across on-prem and air-gapped environments (firmware/BIOS/UEFI, BMC via Redfish/IPMI, OS, RAID, kernel and storage tuning) using zero-touch provisioning (PXE/iPXE, MAAS/Metal3/Tinkerbell/Ironic) and automation (Ansible, Terraform, or equivalent — the tooling matters less than the automation mindset).
- Build and run modern data-center networking: L2/L3 design, IP Fabric, BGP and switching, and RDMA fabrics (RoCE/InfiniBand) sized to scale without ripping out the core.
- Engineer resilient, highly available storage (Ceph/Rook, NVMe) with capacity planning and encryption at rest.
- Operate confidently in air-gapped and on-prem environments: offline mirrors and registries, signed artifacts, firmware/driver lifecycle without internet access, and system hardening.
- Support MLOps and inference-serving fundamentals — GPU model serving (Triton/KServe/vLLM), GPU scheduling and sharing, and throughput/latency optimization — in partnership with our SRE and ML teams.
- Plan and run on-site build-outs: rack integration, power budgets, thermal/cooling and UPS sizing, commissioning, capacity planning, runbooks, and operator handover, with SWaP awareness for field sites.
About You
- 5+ years in bare-metal, data-center, or systems infrastructure engineering, with hands-on ownership of physical and compute infrastructure at scale.