Data Center Lead

i3D.net

At i3D.net, we provide world-class global coverage with one of the most interconnected networks in the world. Our solutions focus on low latency, zero packet loss, and unmatched scalability, enabling seamless experiences for millions of users worldwide. With dedicated support, bespoke solutions, and cutting-edge technology, we deliver reliable, cost-efficient infrastructure that empowers game developers and businesses to scale effortlessly. Partnering with major names like Nvidia, DuckDuckGo, and Ubisoft, we are shaping the future of gaming and network technology. WHY YOUR ROLE MATTERS As a Network Engineering Manager at i3D.net, you’ll lead and support a global network engineering team responsible for building, scaling, and operating one of the world’s most interconnected gaming and infrastructure networks. From our Rotterdam office, you’ll guide engineers working across both service provider backbone and high-performance datacenter environments. You’ll be responsible for creating focus, structure, and technical direction within the team, while staying close enough to the technology to understand priorities, risks, trade-offs, and escalations. The team works with Juniper hardware, automation tools like Ansible and Python, and smart monitoring platforms like Kentik and Grafana to keep traffic flowing smoothly worldwide. You’ll be part of a technical environment that values doing things right — automated, secure, well-documented, and always evolving. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING * Leadership: Lead, coach, and develop a team of network engineers working across backbone, datacenter, automation, monitoring, and customer-facing network projects. * Team Development: Support engineers in their growth through mentoring, regular feedback, knowledge sharing, and clear development plans. * Delivery: Help the team prioritize and deliver network upgrades, datacenter expansions, automation improvements, and operational initiatives. * Operations: Oversee day-to-day network operations, making sure incidents, escalations, and customer-impacting issues are handled with ownership and urgency. * Technical Direction: Work closely with network architects and senior engineers to translate technical strategy into practical execution. * Monitoring & Capacity: Ensure the team uses tools like Kentik and Grafana to monitor traffic, identify bottlenecks, and support capacity planning. * Automation: Drive a culture of automation by encouraging improvements in workflows, configuration management, and operational reliability. * Documentation: Make sure network documentation, diagrams, standards, and operational procedures are kept up to date and are easy for teams to use. * Security: Support the team in enforcing network security practices, including DDoS mitigation, traffic filtering, and operational risk management. * Collaboration: Work closely with product teams, customer support, infrastructure, architects, and other engineering teams to align priorities and support customer requirements. * Customer Support: Support senior engineers during major customer escalations and help ensure clear communication, ownership, and follow-up. TECH STACK At i3D.net, your team will work with: * Hardware: Juniper MX, QFX, SRX, EX; legacy includes Mellanox, Cumulus, Brocade. * Protocols: BGP, IS-IS, OSPF, EVPN-VXLAN, MPLS, L2/L3 VPNs. * Automation: Ansible, Python, YAML. * Tooling & Integration: Netbox, Kentik, Grafana, REST APIs. * DCI: ADVA & Adtran DWDM, Coherent Optics, metro connectivity. * Security: Custom DDoS mitigation, traffic filtering, and threat detection. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN THE FIRST YEAR * You have built trust with the network engineering team and created clarity around priorities, ownership, and ways of working * You have helped the team deliver key network upgrades and datacenter expansion projects in close collaboration with network architects and senior engineers. * You’ve improved the team’s operational rhythm, including incident follow-up, documentation, capacity planning, and customer escalation handling. * You’ve supported the further development of automation practices that improve delivery speed, reliability, and consistency. * You’re seen as a strong people leader who understands the technical environment and helps engineers do their best work. * You’ve helped make the team stronger through coaching, structured knowledge sharing, better collaboration, and clear technical prioritization. ABOUT YOU * Education: You have a bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in networking, IT, computer science, or a related field. * Experience: You have significant experience in network engineering, preferably in ISP, telecom, cloud, gaming infrastructure, or datacenter environments. * Leadership: You have experience leading, mentoring, or managing network engineers, either as an engineering manager, team lead, technical lead, or senior engineer with strong people leadership responsibilities. * Network Skills: You understand service provider and datacenter networking concepts, including BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, EVPN-VXLAN, MPLS, and L2/L3 VPNs. * Hardware: You are familiar with Juniper environments or similar high-performance networking platforms such as Cisco, Arista, Nokia, or Brocade. * Automation: You understand the value of automation and have experience working with tools such as Ansible, Python, Netbox, or similar platforms. * Tooling: You are comfortable working with monitoring, documentation, and operational tooling such as Kentik, Grafana, Netbox, REST APIs, or similar tools. * Troubleshooting: You understand how complex network issues are investigated and resolved, from hardware and optics to routing, traffic flow, configuration, and customer impact. * Operational Ownership: You know how to balance project delivery with operational reliability, incident response, on-call processes, and customer escalations. * Communication: You are fluent in English and able to explain technical topics clearly to engineers, stakeholders, leadership, and non-technical teams. * People Management: You enjoy helping people grow, setting direction, creating structure, giving feedback, and building a healthy engineering culture. * Broader Tech Insight: You have a good understanding of related infrastructure areas such as Linux, storage, virtualization, cloud fundamentals, and datacenter operations. * Certifications: JNCIP-SP, JNCIP-DC, CCNP, CCIE, or similar certifications are a plus, but not required. * Remote vs Onsite: This is a hybrid position with onsite work required at our Rotterdam office. You are either based near Rotterdam or open to relocating. Candidates must be authorized to work in the Netherlands. WHY JOIN I3D.NET? * Global Exposure: We operate our own international backbone network, with a presence in over 60 locations worldwide. * State-of-the-Art Technology: Work with cutting-edge service provider and datacenter equipment in a high-performance global network environment. * Leadership Impact: Lead a skilled engineering team working on infrastructure that directly supports millions of users worldwide. * Technical Depth: Stay close to advanced networking topics such as backbone routing, datacenter networking, DDoS mitigation, automation, monitoring, and capacity planning. * Scale & Complexity: Help shape how a global network is built, operated, automated, and improved. * Competitive Perks: Enjoy great pay, an annual bonus, vacation days, travel allowance, pension, and other local benefits. * Skill Development: Level up with career guidance, leadership development, and education reimbursement. * Gaming Perks: Get lifetime access to Ubisoft’s game library and two free games every year

i3D.net

At i3D.net, we provide world-class global coverage with one of the most interconnected networks in the world. Our solutions focus on low latency, zero packet loss, and unmatched scalability, enabling seamless experiences for millions of users worldwide. With dedicated support, bespoke solutions, and cutting-edge technology, we deliver reliable, cost-efficient infrastructure that empowers game developers and businesses to scale effortlessly. Partnering with major names like Nvidia, DuckDuckGo, and Ubisoft, we are shaping the future of gaming and network technology. WHY YOUR ROLE MATTERS As a Senior Systems Engineer, you’ll take ownership of the stability, automation, and performance of our internal systems infrastructure. You’ll work across CI/CD pipelines, container tooling, system tuning, and infrastructure-as-code to support real-time workloads on a global scale. The infrastructure you'll be automating is running in i3D.net's own data centers, so you will have the opportunity to work with the whole vertical stack of hardware, hypervisors, Linux management, Kubernetes clusters and other private cloud offerings. The role spans the full lifecycle, from deploying and automating services to maintaining and improving the reliability of systems running in our bare-metal and hybrid environments. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES * Design and Build Platform Features: You’ll co-architect new platform features, making sure they’re scalable, reliable, and work smoothly across middleware components like ProxMox and Kubernetes. * Automate and Optimize Infrastructure: You’ll automate the setup and management of infrastructure using tools like Terraform and Ansible, improving the performance and efficiency of systems like databases, web servers, and message queues. * CI/CD Pipeline Development: You’ll create and maintain CI/CD pipelines that help keep our development process smooth and efficient, enabling continuous integration and delivery across different environments. * Monitor and Log Systems Health: You’ll implement and manage monitoring and logging solutions to make sure everything is running smoothly, using tools like Nagios, Prometheus, Grafana, and others. * Collaborate on Systems Engineering Strategy: You’ll work closely with other teams to make sure the systems engineering strategies align with business goals and the overall product roadmap. * Ensure Security and Compliance: You’ll put security best practices into action and ensure that we meet all relevant standards and regulations to keep our platform safe and sound. * Promote SRE and GitOps Practices: You’ll advocate for Reliability and GitOps practices, helping create a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence across the team. * Mentorship and Knowledge Sharing: You’ll mentor junior engineers and share your knowledge with the team, encouraging best practices and a focus on learning and growth. TECH STACK At i3D.net, you’ll work with: * Infrastructure & Tools: Linux (mainly Debian and Alpine), containers & Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions workflows, ArgoCD * Middleware: nginx, OpenSearch, RabbitMQ * Databases: MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis/Keydb * Observability: Nagios, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN THE FIRST YEAR * You’ve made the systems engineering platform more reliable, scalable, and easier to maintain * You’ve automated infrastructure tasks and reduced manual overhead * You’ve improved CI/CD pipelines to support faster, safer deployments * You’ve strengthened observability and security across the platform * You’ve contributed to the platform roadmap and supported your teammates through mentoring and collaboration ABOUT YOU * Strong Linux Expertise: Deep hands-on experience managing Linux systems in bare-metal or hybrid environments, beyond purely cloud-native setups, including container-optimized or minimal distributions. * Systems Engineering Experience: At least 4 years working with highly available, distributed, high-traffic systems such as game servers, media platforms, or global APIs, with strong uptime and performance requirements across staging and production. Design experience is a plus. * Private Cloud exposure: Experience deploying and operating Private Cloud platforms, for example OpenStack, with responsibility for production stability and lifecycle management. * Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Proven use of Ansible and Terraform to provision and manage infrastructure at scale. * CI/CD & GitOps: Proven use of Ansible and Terraform to provision infrastructure at scale, and solid experience building and maintaining GitHub Actions workflows, pipelines with GitOps tooling such as Argo CD. * Observability experience: Hands-on experience with Prometheus and Grafana in production environments, ideally within multi-tenant or regulated contexts. * Collaboration & Mentorship: Experience working in SRE, DevOps, or platform teams, mentoring engineers through code reviews and incident retrospectives, and contributing to internal tooling and documentation. * Remote vs Onsite: This is a hybrid role, so you'll spend some time working onsite at our Rotterdam office. If you're already in the Netherlands, great. If not, we're happy to support your move with our relocation services (a valid EU work permit is required). WHY JOIN US? * Global Impact: Help build and operate our internal platform on our own hardware, deployed across multiple data centers worldwide, with a focus on performance, scalability, and reliability. * Innovation at Scale: Drive the orchestration and automation of our bare-metal platform, ensuring full control, scalability, and high performance across global deployments. * Hybrid Work Setup: Enjoy the flexibility of a hybrid role with a work-from-home budget and top-tier tools. * Career Growth: Access education reimbursement, career guidance, and opportunities to upskill. * Competitive Perks: Annual bonus, 25 vacation days (excluding national holidays), travel allowance, and a solid pension plan. * Stay Active: Free access to our in-house gym in Rotterdam. * Free Games: Enjoy lifetime access to Ubisoft’s game library

i3D.net

At i3D.net, we provide world-class global coverage with one of the most interconnected networks in the world. Our solutions focus on low latency, zero packet loss, and unmatched scalability, enabling seamless experiences for millions of users worldwide. With dedicated support, bespoke solutions, and cutting-edge technology, we deliver reliable, cost-efficient infrastructure that empowers game developers and businesses to scale effortlessly. Partnering with major names like Nvidia, DuckDuckGo, and Ubisoft, we are shaping the future of gaming and network technology. WHY YOUR ROLE MATTERS As a Senior Linux Engineer - Databases, you take ownership of the availability, performance, and reliability of our database platforms that underpin real-time and latency-sensitive workloads across i3D.net’s global infrastructure. You operate at the intersection of database engineering, Linux systems, and platform automation, ensuring that our database environments are consumable by our internal teams, scalable, resilient, and observable. The infrastructure you work on runs in i3D.net’s own data centers, giving you direct exposure to the full vertical stack, from bare metal, Linux management and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to Kubernetes, database clustering, and load balancing. The role spans the full lifecycle of database platforms, from designing the service for consumptions by our internal product teams, supporting in the deployment of new clusters, automating operations, improving performance, and supporting mission critical production environments. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING * Design and build database platforms: You design, build, and evolve highly available RDBMS platforms, ensuring they are resilient, scalable, and aligned with platform standards across multiple environments. * Operate and optimize database clusters: You manage multi-environment database clusters, including replication, failover, backups, and performance tuning, using components such as Kubernetes and load balancers. * Automate database operations: You automate database provisioning, configuration, upgrades, and maintenance using IaC, reducing manual effort and increasing consistency across environments. * Linux and systems ownership: You take responsibility for the Linux systems running database workloads, handling day-to-day operations, troubleshooting, and system-level tuning in bare metal and hybrid setups. * CI/CD for database platforms: You integrate database changes into CI/CD pipelines, supporting safe and repeatable deployments, schema changes, and configuration updates across staging and production. * Monitoring and observability: You implement and maintain monitoring and alerting for database platforms using tools such as Prometheus and Grafana, ensuring clear visibility into performance, capacity, and reliability. * Security and reliability: You apply security best practices to database platforms, including access control, encryption, and compliance requirements, while continuously improving availability and recovery processes. * Collaboration and knowledge sharing: You work closely with platform, DevOps, and application teams, sharing knowledge, improving internal tooling, and supporting incident reviews and continuous improvement. TECH STACK At i3D.net, you’ll work with: * Databases: MariaDB, PostgreSQL, multi-node clusters, replication, backups and recovery * Infrastructure and tooling: Linux (bare metal and hybrid), Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, GitHub Actions * Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, logging and alerting stacks * Practices: Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, Agile ways of working, you build it, you deploy it, you support it. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN THE FIRST YEAR * Database platforms are stable, scalable and consumable by our systems and teams * Manual database operations are largely automated * Performance and availability issues are detected earlier and resolved faster * Backup, recovery, and failover processes are reliable and well tested * You are a trusted point of knowledge for database and platform topics within the team YOUR PROFILE * Database platform experience: You have 5+ years of hands-on experience managing production database platforms, preferably MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL, with strong requirements around uptime, performance, and data integrity. * Linux & Kubernetes expertise: You are comfortable operating Linux systems, especially in on-premise or hybrid environments, and regularly troubleshoot issues spanning storage, networking, and system resources. * Automation and Infrastructure-as-Code: You use tools like Ansible and Terraform to automate database and infrastructure workflows and avoid manual configuration wherever possible. * CI/CD and platform integration: You have experience integrating databases into CI/CD pipelines and working alongside application and platform teams to support reliable releases. Experience with GitHub Actions is a plus. * Monitoring and observability: You have worked with Prometheus and Grafana in production environments and understand how to monitor database health, performance, and capacity effectively. * Collaboration and mindset: You enjoy working in platform or SRE style teams, contributing to documentation and tooling, and supporting others through reviews, incidents, and shared learning. * Remote vs onsite: This role can be based in Rotterdam, Atlanta, or Montreal/Quebec. We follow a hybrid setup with 2 days per week onsite and the remaining days remote, so you should already be based within commuting distance of one of these offices. Please note that we do not offer relocation or visa sponsorship for this role. You must already hold a valid work permit for the Netherlands, US, or Canada. WHY JOIN US? * Global Impact: Help build and operate our internal platform on our own hardware, deployed across multiple data centers worldwide, with a focus on performance, scalability, and reliability. * Innovation at Scale: Drive the orchestration and automation of our bare-metal platform, ensuring full control, scalability, and high performance across global deployments. * Hybrid Work Setup: Enjoy the flexibility of a hybrid role with a work-from-home budget and top-tier tools. * Career Growth: Access to education reimbursement, career guidance, and opportunities to upskill. * Competitive Perks: Annual bonus, Generous PTO, travel allowance, pension plan. * Free Games: Enjoy lifetime access to Ubisoft’s game library