Can you be a haddock engineer?Engineers at
haddock
are
action-oriented ,
curious ,
autonomous, and take
full ownership
of their work.
They are champions of figuring out the unknowns. They talk to customers, deliver quality work, improve our tooling, and are ambitious. We look for people with these same motivations and ways of working.
Lean Startup
and
Agile
principles, favoring action over analysis, imperfect iteration over perfect delivery, and face-to-face communication.
As
Senior DevOps / SRE Engineer, you'll be an individual contributor within the engineering team, occasionally embedded in squads, but most of the time working on the platform roadmap. You won't lead people (yet), but you will lead technical initiatives that touch every engineer at haddock. You're expected to be opinionated, pragmatic, and to contribute code. This is not an ops-only role.
haddock is an AI-first company, and so is this role. More than 50% of our infrastructure cost today is tied to AI workloads, not traditional SaaS software operations. You'll own both worlds: classic platform work and the cost, performance and reliability of our AI stack. You'll also use AI daily to do your own work, from infra automation, debugging, writing code, monitoring, etc.
Your work cuts across the stack to make the whole team faster and safer:
Secure our data layer
(VPC, DNS, secrets, IAM)
Improve CI/CD and developer productivity
Make infra observable: clear, actionable metrics and dashboards, including AI workload cost and performance
Own cloud cost: visibility, predictability, optimization, with a sharp focus on our AI spend
Help us scale performance: PostgreSQL optimization, caches, queues, pub/sub, and search/analytics infra (Elasticsearch, BigQuery, ClickHouse…)



when the product calls for it
Architect what comes next: alerting, team growth, next layer of scale
Our processes and tools are constantly improving, and everyone contributes to making them better.
Keep-the-lights-on work is shared, like bug fixing, monitoring and dependency management. We succeed at this by having a rotating squad of Defenders that tackles this kind of maintenance work.
Example workSome example high-level objectives that you could work towards in your first months are:
Moving our PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases behind a VPC
with no downtime, and tightening secrets management and IAM along the way.
Getting AI infra cost and performance under control : instrumenting our AI workflows, identifying waste, and making our AI spend predictable as we scale.
Improving CI/CD and preview environments
so product engineers (and AI agents doing the work) ship faster with less friction.
Fixing our top performance bottlenecks:
identifying the queries and endpoints that hurt most, fixing them, and mentoring the team so good query patterns become the default.
Leading the decision
on whether to adopt Elasticsearch, BigQuery, ClickHouse or similar, backed by data from real product needs.
Requirements
5+ years of engineering experience, with time spent inside a platform,



infrastructure or SRE team at a growing startup or scaleup operating real production systems. In a nutshell: you're an individual contributor who's seen how it's done well and wants to be the one setting the bar in a smaller, faster environment.
Accomplished in cloud and platform: hands-on with cloud infra, VPCs, networking, IAM and secrets. You've improved CI/CD and developer productivity in a growing team.
Performance and scale at the data layer: you've fought DB performance for real, designing indexes, solving partitioning, etc. You've worked with caches, queues or pub/sub in prod, and have used at least one search or analytics tool at scale (Elasticsearch, BigQuery, ClickHouse or similar).
AI-native way of working. You already use AI daily, with good judgement and real productivity. You're excited that 50%+ of our infra cost is AI and want to own that. Candidates who don't embrace AI are not a fit.
You write clean code and can contribute to the product monorepo. You're not ops-only.
Fluent in Spanish and comfortable in English. We tend to speak in Spanish at the office and in Slack, and write documentation and projects in English.
What we offer?
First and foremost, the project itself is the main reason why people join haddock: a growing startup with ambition, product-market fit, and great culture.
A competitive salary (€50–60k gross/year).
A bright modern office in Barcelona, in Poblenou. Probably the best office you've ever worked at.
Hybrid work, with 2 days at the office to build trust, collaborate, align and get creative.
All AI tooling that you wish to experiment with.
A subsidized Urban Sports Club membership: yoga, HIIT, hot studios…
Enjoy benefits when spending p

📌 Senior Devops (Madrid)
🏢 haddock
📍 Madrid