Staff Infrastructure Engineer (Lisbon-Based)

About Us

1GLOBAL is a technology-driven global mobile communications provider, delivering global connectivity solutions to enterprises and consumers. Powered by a best-in-class telecom platform – including its own owned and operated global mobile core network, fully fledged in-house developed eSIM technology, and an extensive portfolio of telecom licenses – 1GLOBAL operates as a fully regulated telecommunications provider across 40 countries worldwide. We serve many of the world’s leading banks, enterprises, and digital-first businesses, including neo-banks, global fast moving consumer goods companies, travel leaders, and payment service providers. Today, 1GLOBAL connects more than 70 million people and devices globally, enabling our customers to launch, scale, and innovate with confidence in the mobile ecosystem.

1GLOBAL is a profitable, fast-growing business. With full-year revenues in 2025 exceeding US$200 million and profits of over US$25 million, we generate strong cash flows to fund our growth allowing us to continuously invest in infrastructure, platform innovation, and global expansion. Recent years have marked a defining phase in our journey, with major enterprise and mass-consumer client wins accelerating our evolution into a global mobile connectivity powerhouse, purpose-built to enable consumer brands to enter and succeed with their own aspirations to offer telecommunications services to their clients.

Founded in 2022 by experienced technology entrepreneurs, Hakan Koç and Pyrros Koussios, 1GLOBAL has rapidly emerged as a European technology leader shaping the future of global telecommunications. We operate as a fully regulated Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) in 12 countries and as a regulated telecom operator in an additional 28 markets. Headquartered in the Netherlands, with world-class R&D hubs in Lisbon, Berlin, and São Paulo, our team of close to 500 experts across 15 countries is united by a single ambition: to redefine global mobile connectivity through technology, scale, and execution excellence.

About the Team

We are looking for a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to join our Technology Department and set the technical direction for our private cloud and bare-metal platforms. This is a senior individual contributor role for an engineer who has architected, built, and operated large-scale OpenStack and Ceph environments in production, and who wants to shape the foundation of a global, carrier-grade infrastructure.

This role is based in Lisbon; Candidates may start from a local office and relocate to Lisbon at a later stage. A willingness to relocate to Lisbon in the future is required.

As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will own the architecture and long-term technical strategy of our private cloud platform for compute and networking, distributed storage, and Metal as a Service (BMaaS). You will lead the design and rollout of new data center deployments, define the standards that the wider Infrastructure team builds to, and act as the technical authority on private cloud, distributed storage, and bare-metal automation across the organization. You will work hands-on while influencing the roadmap, mentoring senior engineers, and partnering with DevOps, IP Network, Security, and SRE leadership to ensure our platform scales reliably across regions.

About the Role

• Architect and Evolve the Private Cloud: Own the end-to-end architecture of our OpenStack-based private cloud (Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Glance, Keystone, Placement, Octavia, Designate) across multiple regions and data centers.
• Lead Ceph at Scale: Design, deploy, and operate large Ceph clusters, tiering, replication strategy, performance tuning, and lifecycle upgrades.
• Operate Bare Metal as a Service: Architect and operate an Ironic-based BMaaS platform integrated with OpenStack and/or Kubernetes, covering hardware enrollment, inspection, image deployment, network provisioning, and lifecycle management at fleet scale.
• Data Center Expansion: Lead the technical design of new data center buildouts, and bare-metal automation, defining reference architectures, hardware standards, and capacity models.
• Infrastructure as Code: Set the standards for IaC across the platform using Terraform, Ansible, Packer, and configuration management — including OpenStack lifecycle tooling (e.g. Kolla-Ansible, OpenStack-Ansible, Charmed OpenStack, etc).
• Networking Architecture: Define the SDN strategy (OVN/OVS), tenant networking, provider networks, BGP/EVPN integration with the underlay, and high-performance datapaths (SR-IOV, DPDK) for latency- and throughput-sensitive workloads.
• Kubernetes on Bare Metal: Architect Kubernetes platforms running on Ironic-provisioned hardware and OpenStack, including service mesh, CNI selection, and integration with Ceph CSI for persistent storage.
• Performance, Capacity, and Cost: Drive capacity planning, performance benchmarking, and TCO modeling for compute, storage, and bare-metal fleets — ensuring efficient resource utilization and predictable scaling.
• Reliability and Operability: Partner with the SRE team to define SLIs/SLOs for platform services, design failure domains, validate disaster recovery, and ensure operational maturity of every new component introduced.
• Security and Compliance: Work closely with Security to harden the platform end-to-end - secure boot, image signing, IAM (Keystone federation, OIDC, LDAP/AD), tenant isolation, and compliance with CIS, ISO 27001, and GDPR.
• Technical Leadership: Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, write RFCs and architecture decision records, and represent Infrastructure in cross-functional technical forums.
• Support and Troubleshooting: Act as the deepest escalation point for the platform; participate in on-call for critical incidents, lead complex root-cause investigations across compute, storage, and network layers.