Distributed Systems Evaluation Engineer (DevOps Focus) at Institute of Free Technology - Technical Services

We are seeking an experienced DevOps Engineer to join our Distributed Systems Testing (DST) team at the Institute of Free Technology (IFT). This role focuses on rigorously assessing the performance and reliability of IFT projects at scale, with Logos (λ) as one of the primary projects.

The Logos (λ) technology stack consists of three main components:

• Logos (λ) Blockchain: Advanced privacy for decentralized applications and social institutions.
• Logos (λ) Messaging: Private peer-to-peer communication that resists surveillance and censorship.
• Logos (λ) Storage: Secure decentralized storage enabling fully decentralized apps and file sharing.

You’ll be responsible for designing and executing comprehensive evaluation strategies, leveraging both large-scale lab deployments and protocol behavior modeling scripts. Your expertise will be crucial in analyzing these complex distributed systems, automating intricate test scenarios, and providing in-depth insights into system behaviors.

Working closely with cross-functional teams, you’ll troubleshoot complex issues and translate technical data into actionable recommendations. Proficiency in containerization, cloud technologies, and distributed systems principles is essential.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, configure, and optimize Kubernetes clusters to support large-scale experiments and benchmarks of peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies.
• Continuously improve cluster scalability and resource utilization, enabling increasingly complex deployments and experiments.
• Set up, maintain, and optimize supporting infrastructure such as monitoring, logging, and observability stacks (Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, etc.).
• Collaborate with DST researchers and engineers to streamline experimentation workflows and make analysis easier and more reproducible.
• Automate infrastructure and deployment workflows to increase reliability and reduce overhead.
• Troubleshoot, profile, and tune distributed workloads to ensure accurate and performant benchmarking.
• Identify, reproduce, and debug complex issues in distributed systems, working closely with Logos development teams.

Ideal Candidate Qualifications:

• Strong experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration in production or research environments.
• Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure, Linux systems, and networking (especially relevant to distributed/P2P systems).
• Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools (Grafana, Prometheus, VictoriaLogs, etc.).
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible, Helm, etc.).
• Proficiency in at least one scripting/programming language (ideally Python).
• Interest in or experience with distributed systems, P2P networks, or blockchain technologies.
• Experience with networks and systems programming.
• Excellent written and conversational communication skills.
• Alignment with the core values and principles of the organization.

Bonus Points:

• Hands-on experience with libp2p or projects in the Logos collective.
• Background in performance benchmarking, scalability testing, or systems research.
• Contributions to open-source projects.
• Experience working for an open-source organization.