Senior DevOps Engineer

Alibaba runs the platform behind a fast-growing, multi-brand travel business. We're hiring a Senior
DevOps Engineer to join a small, high-ownership DevOps/SRE team responsible for our production and
staging environments.

Our platform is fully self-hosted and on-premise — we run our own Kubernetes, GitLab, CI/CD,
distributed storage, databases, and messaging on our own infrastructure. This is a hands-on role for an
engineer who wants to own systems end-to-end across the full stack, and who is energised by
strengthening and modernising a large, established estate. It is not a managed-cloud position.

Responsibilities:

• Operate and evolve our Kubernetes platform — Rancher/RKE and kubespray clusters: version
  upgrades, scaling, storage (Longhorn), networking, and workload security.
• Operate our stateful services — PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Kafka, RabbitMQ, and
  distributed storage: upgrades, backups, failover, capacity planning, and incident response. This is a
  significant part of the role.
• Automate provisioning, patching, upgrades, and lifecycle across our Linux estate with Ansible and
  Terraform/OpenTofu — reducing toil so the team can focus on higher-value work.
• Lead modernisation and lifecycle work — operating-system upgrades, patch management, and
  standardisation across the estate.
• Own CI/CD and GitOps — GitLab CI pipelines and ArgoCD-based delivery.
• Strengthen security and access — secrets management (HashiCorp Vault), SSO/IAM (Keycloak), access
  control, and CIS hardening, all of which we are actively maturing.
• Own observability — metrics, logs, traces, and alerting for always-up, always-available services.
• Troubleshoot production issues end-to-end and drive them to resolution with minimal customer
  impact.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and partner with development teams to adopt DevOps best
  practices and move applications toward cloud-native patterns on our platform.
• Remediate at the root — identify recurring issues and resolve their underlying causes.

Requirements

• Deep Linux/Unix systems administration — the core of this role. 5–8 years operating, tuning,
  securing, and troubleshooting Linux servers at scale in production.
• Strong TCP/IP and networking fundamentals (DNS, HTTP/S, TLS, routing, load balancing).
• Production expertise with Docker and Kubernetes, including hands-on cluster lifecycle
  (Rancher, RKE, and/or kubespray).
• Configuration management and IaC: Ansible, plus Terraform/OpenTofu.
• CI/CD with GitLab, and solid Git / GitFlow.
• Strong scripting in at least Bash and Python (Perl or Ruby a bonus).
• Proven experience operating stateful systems in production — relational (PostgreSQL) and
  NoSQL/key-value (Redis, MongoDB), plus messaging (RabbitMQ).
• Web servers and load balancers (Nginx, HAProxy).
• Observability in production: VictoriaMetrics/Prometheus, Grafana, and log/trace pipelines
  (Fluentd/EFK or ELK, OpenTelemetry).
• Working knowledge of at least one programming language (.NET, Node.js, or Go) to partner
  effectively with application teams.
• Knowledge of best practices for running an always-up, always-available service.
• Excellent troubleshooting, a fast learner, and a strong ownership mindset — comfortable operating
  independently and taking a problem from first report to resolution.