Systems & IT Engineer (w/m/d) 100%
Systems & IT Engineer who runs Papers' self-hosted Linux (Ubuntu) bare-metal infrastructure: patching servers, building GitLab CI pipelines, deploying with Docker/Ansible, operating the observability and backup stack, hardening security, and administering Microsoft 365/Entra ID, with on-call duty including Acurast blockchain services.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Zug
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 3+ years 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, patch management
- Strong written and verbal communication skills in English
- Self-driven, self-organized, pragmatic, comfortable working independently
- Already living in Switzerland
Nice to have
- Background in blockchain/web3 infrastructure
- 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
- Contributions to open-source projects
- Experience scaling infrastructure in startup or high-growth environments
Full description
Please note that for this position, we'll only consider applications from people who are already living in Switzerland.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