Cloud Engineer - OpenStack

Why this role matters?

We’re building the cloud Europe deserves - open, trustworthy, and competitive. The market and opportunity for EU-made tech has never been better.

Built heavily on open‑source technologies, our platform can scale from a single VM in public cloud to multiple racks in a customer’s private cloud.

Being a small company means we have to be smart with our time and money: we aim to build things once, build them well, and make them work for many customers.

Who are you?

You like building things that actually run, not just in theory. We’re looking for someone who is experienced in Openstack, can improve Ceph clusters, tune hypervisors, or automate tricky setups.

You’ll join a small but experienced team where curiosity and autonomy are valued over bureaucracy.

You can work fully remotely, from our Stockholm office, or anywhere in EU. We’ll sort you out with the gear you need, plus all the stability that comes from a collective bargaining agreement (or equivalent outside Sweden).

What you’ll work on:

• Skip-version OpenStack upgrades. We’re building tooling to jump multiple releases in a single maintenance window instead of crawling release-by-release. If you’ve ever sat through a Nova upgrade at 2am, you know why this matters.
• Migrating control planes from libvirt to Kubernetes + KubeVirt. OpenStack services running as Kubernetes workloads, deployed via Helm, lifecycle-managed like any other modern app. Standard rolling deploys instead of bespoke upgrade rituals.
• Ceph at scale. Tuning, expanding, occasionally rescuing. Performance, durability, and “is this PG actually healthy” are daily conversations.
• Network plumbing that doesn’t lie to you. Neutron, OVN/OVS, BGP peerings, and the boring-but-critical work of making L3 behave the same in dev and prod.
• Automation as a first-class deliverable. Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines that we trust enough to ship from. If you’ve ever written a one-line shell script that became load-bearing — you know what we’re trying to avoid.

What we need from you:

• Strong Linux fundamentals — you’re comfortable in strace, journalctl, and ip -s link territory, not just kubectl.
• Production experience with OpenStack: Nova, Neutron, Keystone, Glance, Cinder. You’ve debugged at least one of them under pressure.
• Kubernetes beyond apply -f. You’ve operated clusters, not just consumed them.
• Automation as muscle memory: Ansible, Terraform, Helm, or equivalents. You write infrastructure as if someone else will read it.
• Pragmatism over purity. You can tell the difference between debt worth paying down and debt worth living with.

Bonus points if you have:

• Hands-on Ceph experience - RBD, RGW, or CephFS in production. Capacity planning, recovery, and the difference between “it’s slow” and “it’s a slow OSD.”
• Experience with BGP or Layer 3 networking.
• Worked with the Rook operator for Ceph automation.
• Written or maintained CI/CD pipelines.

Your Team and ways of working

You’ll join us at IaaS Team (Infrastructure as a Service) consisting of 7 talented engineers, lead by Anders Johansson.

We work in two‑week sprints with demos and retros that actually improve how we work.

Your future team is remote-friendly, however we value time spent together. We will meet for company offsites in May, and travel for tech conferences together (e.g. KubeCon or OpenInfra).

Projects we are currently working on include:

• Developing innovative OpenStack upgrade methods, enabling us to skip multiple versions and catch up quickly with tech debt
• Migrating internal control planes from libvirt to Kubernetes with KubeVirt
• Consolidating internal tooling between the PaaS team and the IaaS team.

Reality check

Working at a small company means living with ambiguity. Priorities shift, context is incomplete, and there is no neatly scoped ticket every morning handed in.

If you like finding the real problem, owning it, and shipping solutions that last - you’ll thrive here. If you prefer very narrow responsibilities or large, highly specialized teams, this may not be the right opportunity.

Interested?

For this role you need to based in EU. As we work with some public research organizations, candidates who get offer of employment with us go through reference and background check.

Start date: as soon as possible, we will interview candidates on rolling basis

Salary range: €50.000 - €80.000 annually

We care more about how you solve problems than how polished your CV looks. Click Apply, drop us what you have, and we’ll take it from there. Looking forward to getting to know you!

About Safespring

At Safespring, we’re giving European organizations an alternative to the hyperscalers. Powered by open source our sustainable and European-based cloud infrastructure puts security, transparency, and digital sovereignty first.

How to apply

If this sounds interesting, you can send in your application by clicking the apply button.

You don’t have to tick every box. If the problems described here sound like the ones you want to work on, it’s worth a conversation.

Questions about this role? Send a message to Marietta, our friendly people lead at marietta@safespring.com.

Location and timeline

Please, notice that for this role you will need to be based in European Union.

As we provide services to some of the public research institutions we will conduct background and reference checks as part of the recruitment process for candidates who get offer of employment with us.