Senior DevOps Engineer (Freelance | Remote | Global)
BespokeLabs - Mountain View, California (VC-backed, founded by IIT & Ivy League leaders)
Type: Contract | Remote | 30-40 hrs/week | 8-16 weeks
Pay: $40-$70/hr
About Bespoke Labs
Bespoke Labs is a VC-backed applied AI research startup based in Mountain View, California. We build core infrastructure and reinforcement learning environments that directly train and evaluate intelligent agents—the systems behind AI, not just the tooling around it.
We focus on building the datasets and benchmarks that shape the future of AI. Our work includes OpenThoughts, one of the most widely used reasoning datasets (100K monthly downloads, 200 models trained, 100 citations), and Terminal Bench, a leading agentic coding benchmark referenced in Claude 4.5 and actively used by frontier AI labs.
About the Role
We're building a new AI training initiative that requires real-world engineering experience. You'll help design and document authentic DevOps backend scenarios based on incidents you've handled—outages, scaling issues, secure deployments, distributed systems challenges, and more. Your experience will directly train next-generation AI systems.
What You'll Do
- Capture real DevOps backend incidents and convert them into benchmark tasks
- Contribute to secure, scalable, Kubernetes-native architectures
- Work across CI/CD, observability, identity, infrastructure-as-code, and backend services
- Collaborate with our team to build realistic engineering workflows
Required Experience (5-12 years)
Strong hands-on experience in DevOps and/or Backend Engineering, including:
- Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, k9s, k3s (GitLab CI preferred)
- Go / Python / Java, Docker, gRPC, Kubernetes-native services
- Experience with secure, offline/air-gapped deployments (big plus)
- Familiarity with at least five of the following:
- Identity & Access Management
- Observability (Prometheus Grafana)
- CI/CD Pipelines
- Keycloak
- GitLab CI
- Terraform OSS
- Kubernetes tools & ecosystem
- ML/Distributed pipelines (nice to have)
Compensation
This is a fully remote opportunity open to candidates based in Germany.
Hourly compensation for core projects typically ranges between USD $40 and $70 per hour. Final rates are determined based on experience, skills evaluation, location, project scope, and overall requirements.
What You'll Find at Bespoke Labs / What makes us different
- Fully remote, flexible schedule (30-40 hrs/week is highly preferred)
- 8-16 week engagement
- Work that genuinely values hands-on, at-scale experience
- Ideal for DevOps engineers exploring high-impact side work or frontier AI exposure (Short Term Project / Full Time Projects)
- We keep the bar high and the teams small
- Prior AI Training experience is NOT mandatory for this freelancing role.
Bespoke Labs Hiring Process
Shortlisting → Take-Home Test / Interview → Onboarding
Apply Now
If you've operated systems at scale and want flexible work while shaping next-gen AI, we'd love to hear from you.
