Principal DevOps Engineer (m/f/d)

Conduit · Berlin, Germany · Remote-first · Full-time
About Conduit
Conduit is a dental interoperability platform, part of the HeyDonto Labs family of companies. We connect the systems dental practices run on so clinical and operational data moves securely and reliably. Our platform handles protected health information every day, and we hold our infrastructure to the standard that deserves.
About the role
As Principal DevOps Engineer, you own the design, evolution and transformation of our cloud and platform architecture. You set the technical direction for our DevOps environments and make sure scalable, secure, high-performing systems are delivered across a multi-repo product landscape: from a single commit to a signed, digest-pinned release running in production.
We run regulated healthcare workloads (HIPAA / PHI) on Google Cloud and are building to SOC 2 standards: GKE clusters reconciled by ArgoCD, Helm charts per environment, Terraform-managed infrastructure, and GitHub Actions pipelines that build, scan, sign and promote every release. You will own that path end to end and decide where it goes next.
What you'll do
Lead the design and evolution of our DevOps and platform architecture
Own the architecture and operation of our cloud and container platform: GCP, GKE, Docker, Helm, ArgoCD, Terraform
Make and document architecture decisions as ADRs, not tribal knowledge
Ensure the quality, performance, security and stability of production systems handling PHI
Build and evolve CI/CD in GitHub Actions, including full supply-chain chain of custody: Trivy gates, SBOM generation, cosign keyless signing and verification, digest pinning end to end
Own the GitOps promotion and rollback model: ArgoCD convergence, backup-then-migrate ordering, one-click rollback
Lead modernization of existing systems, including our Cloud Run to GKE/GitOps cutover and decommissioning of legacy infrastructure
Keep the platform aligned with HIPAA and SOC 2 requirements, working alongside our compliance tooling
Design for loud failures: a deploy gate that blocks silently is a defect
Write runbooks so the platform is operable by someone other than its author
Mentor DevOps engineers and the wider engineering team, and contribute to technical planning and hiring
What you bring
10+ years in DevOps, Cloud or Platform Engineering
Proven experience owning a production platform, not only contributing to one
Experience delivering in regulated or high-assurance environments, with healthcare strongly preferred
Degree in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, physics, or equivalent experience
Fluent English, spoken and written (C1 minimum); our team works in English every day
Able to work regular overlap hours with US Eastern Time (early afternoon to evening in Berlin)
Healthcare and dental experience (strongly preferred)
Hands-on experience running infrastructure that stores or processes PHI under HIPAA
Familiarity with healthcare data standards and integrations (HL7, FHIR, EHR or practice management systems)
Dental technology experience is a significant plus
Experience supporting SOC 2 audits and evidence collection from the infrastructure side
Technical skills
GCP depth (or deep AWS/Azure with a track record of going deep on a new cloud)
Production Kubernetes, ideally GKE: Workload Identity, private clusters, autoscaling node pools, release channels, PodDisruptionBudgets, namespace and RBAC design
ArgoCD and GitOps in practice: app-of-apps, AppProjects, sync waves, PreSync hooks, drift detection
Terraform: modules, workspaces, remote state, state migrations, tflint, cost awareness
Helm chart authoring with environment-scoped values and encrypted secrets (SOPS + Cloud KMS)
GitHub Actions: reusable and composite workflows, OIDC / Workload Identity Federation, SHA-pinned actions, branch rulesets
Supply-chain security: Trivy / OSV, SBOM (SPDX), Sigstore / cosign, gitleaks, pre-commit, CodeQL
Microservices and API-based architectures
Ingress and connectivity: Traefik, external-dns, cert-manager, VPC/NAT, private service access, Tailscale
Observability: Prometheus / Grafana, Cloud Monitoring, actionable alerting
Databases in the deploy path: Cloud SQL Postgres, expand/contract migrations, backup-gated releases
Preferred certifications
CKA and/or CKAD
Google Cloud Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
HashiCorp Terraform Associate
AWS DevOps Engineer Professional or Microsoft DevOps Engineer Expert (nice to have)
What we offer
Highly competitive compensation, based on experience
A platform you genuinely own, with architecture decisions that are yours to make and write down
A distributed, multicultural team across Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, working in English
Real product velocity: every merge to main ships to staging within minutes
An engineering culture built on ADRs, runbooks and reviewed changes
Flexible hours and remote-first work, with a shared daily overlap window across Berlin and US Eastern Time
Funded certifications (CKA/CKAD, GCP, Terraform) plus conference and training budget
Direct impact on healthcare infrastructure that dental clinicians rely on every day

Work arrangement
Yes