DevOps/SRE Engineer (Proxy)

Overview

SOAX is a proxy infrastructure company with a product customers genuinely love and depend on. Our system is a geo-distributed, high-load platform written in Go, handling HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5/TCP/UDP traffic across millions of nodes worldwide.

We've passed the MVP stage, grown fast, and now our infrastructure needs to catch up with the product. We're looking for someone who gets excited by that challenge — not someone who waits for a ticket that spells out exactly what to do (we'll hand you the problem, not the instructions), but someone who will SSH into a box at 2 AM, find the root cause, fix it — with AI in the toolkit, of course — and then build the system so it never happens again.

Fair warning: we have our share of tangled infrastructure — the same problem solved three different ways in three different places over time, all of it needing maintenance until we untangle it. If mismatched patchwork solutions make you twitch and want to fix them properly, you'll fit right in.

This role is for someone who genuinely likes a challenge and is driven by results, who values personal freedom and flexibility (fully remote, four-day work week) — but who also wants real intensity: hard problems, real ownership, and a startup pace.

What you're walking into

• A geo-distributed system routing proxy traffic across bare-metal nodes globally — millions of nodes, real traffic, real money riding on it.
• The tangle we mentioned: overlapping fixes, inconsistent patterns, and infrastructure that works but wasn't always built the same way twice.
• Low-level networking challenges: routing, load balancing, protocol-level debugging.
• A lean team where your impact is immediately visible.
• An on-call rotation shared with one other engineer.

What you'll actually do

• Troubleshoot and fix things. Incidents happen. You dig in, find root causes, and resolve them — not "coordinate the response," but actually do the work.
• Rebuild infrastructure properly. Take what we have and make it production-grade: monitoring, alerting, deployment pipelines, disaster recovery.
• Work at the network level. Debug packet flows, optimize routing, understand why latency spikes between nodes in different regions. This is not a "deploy containers and forget" role.
• Automate everything that should be automated. If you're doing something manually twice, build a system for it.
• Drive your own strategic projects. Beyond firefighting, you'll identify what needs fixing at a structural level, propose it, get alignment, and own it end-to-end. This isn't a role where someone else does all the thinking and hands you a backlog.

What we need from you (non-negotiable)

• Networking fundamentals you can defend live — subnetting, NAT, routing, DNS, TLS. Not textbook definitions, but the ability to reason through a scenario out loud.
• Real bare-metal experience — actual hands-on with physical infrastructure at some point in your career.
• DevOps as genuine curiosity, not just a job — something you built or broke on your own time, not because a ticket told you to.
• A proven root-cause habit — a specific story where you found the actual cause of an issue, not just where you patched the symptom.
• 5+ years hands-on in DevOps / SRE / Infrastructure roles. (3–5 years are welcome to apply, but should be ready to demonstrate senior-level systems thinking live.)
• Comfort with on-call and incident response.

Strong plus

• Proxy protocols, traffic routing at scale, or CDN/edge experience.
• Self-hosted ClickHouse, Redis, Kafka, MongoDB.
• English good enough for a live technical conversation; Russian a plus but not required.

What we offer

• Fully remote, four-day work week.
• Compensation paid in GBP.
• Reporting directly to the CTO.
• Paid time off and sick leave.