Working Student Infrastructure/DevOps at Alcemy

Help us decarbonize the cement and concrete industry.

alcemy was founded to reduce the massive CO2 footprint of the cement and concrete industry. Concrete is humanity's second most used material by volume and its production is responsible for around 8% of global CO2 emissions.

We are changing this! We leverage machine learning to provide smart production control software to the cement and concrete supply chain to improve efficiency and allow for the production of low-carbon cement and concrete at large scale. Our software is used 24/7 in cement and concrete plants to optimize production and reduce carbon emissions today. We are currently enabling our customers to save more than 100 000 tons of CO2 emissions each year and we aim to save 100 million tons per year in 2030.

Now as we’re growing we need you to support our Infrastructure/DevOps team.

• Join the infrastructure/DevOps team as a working student for up to 20 hours/week.
• Work closely with the other engineers to ensure our AWS-based infrastructure, kubernetes platforms, and development processes are top notch.
• Support application developers and ML specialists in their daily work with questions around tooling, deployment, CI/CD, and many others.
• Develop internal solutions and tooling - using Python or Bash for example - to automate and optimize our setup.
• Take your first steps in the industry working in a startup where your actions truly have an impact.
• Help save the planet!

Requirements

• You care about fighting climate change.
• You are a student currently enrolled in a Computer Science or similar program at a German university.
• You have experience with AWS, kubernetes, and a CI/CD platform.
• You are comfortable with the shell, Bash scripting, and git.
• You are a good communicator.

Even better:

• You know how IaC with Terraform works.
• You can set up and administer a kubernetes cluster.
• You know what these abbreviations mean and have some experience working with them: EC2, SQS, SNS, S3, EKS, RDS, IAM.
• You can tell the difference between Github and Gitlab and understand how CI/CD works on both platforms.
• You know some Python.

Within the first month, you will...

• complete our onboarding and get guided through our development and CI/CD process and the details of our cloud infrastructure.
• know your way around the team and have helped the team to ship features.
• inevitably learn a lot about cement production or the intricacies of concrete data.
  

Within three months, you will…

• upgrade our kubernetes clusters to a new major version which we do multiple times a year.
• have contributed code to some of our repositories, or even our Python-based CI helper chatbot.
• learn the intricacies of Terraform code and collaborative work on Terraform code.
• be able to assist other engineers when their applications fail by understanding logs and metrics.

Our Tech stack:

• Our applications and data are hosted entirely on AWS, we make use of a variety of their services. EKS, EC2, RDS, and S3 are among them. We manage all of this infrastructure as code with Terraform in a Git repository.
• We want reliability, scalability, and flexibility, so we built a kubernetes-based platform for running our applications. Deployment is automated and hooked tightly into our development workflow. Most engineers know how to interact and work with the platform.
• All our code lives on Gitlab and we use Gitlab CI to drive our development process.
• Our applications are written in Python using a number of different frameworks like FastAPI or scikit-learn. The frontend applications are built on top of NextJS and React.

Benefits

• A company culture where honesty, professionalism, and integrity run deep with an open feedback culture and regular 1:1 meetings.
• Flat hierarchies, efficient decision-making processes, and an agile company structure.
• Competitive market-rate salary aligned with your experience.
• Work fully remotely within Germany or from our office in the heart of Berlin with flexible working hours.
• Of course, free drinks, fruit and snacks in the office.
• Regular team activities and team weeks a few times per year.
• Mac or Linux laptop.
• English is our main language of communication.
• 28 days of vacation per year and an additional day of vacation every 2 years at alcemy.
• Access to nilo.health - the comprehensive mental well-being platform that provides access to 1-to-1 sessions with psychologists, group sessions and self-guided tools.
• Dog-friendly office with specific rules in place, as well as dog-free areas for work and relaxation.

• We value transparency, and direct feedback and are always open to refactoring how we work together.
• Engineers take ownership of their features from implementation, testing through code reviews, and deployment.
• No one is on-call.
• We’ve been working hard to get a defined career progression framework in place, charting out both technical expert & management tracks.
• We are passionate about helping our customers and always approach them and each other in a supportive and appreciative way.
• We use modern communication tools like Google Workspace and Slack.

Our hiring process is fully remote and we’ll communicate with you over email and video chat.

• Initial 1:1 screening call (30 minutes) with one of our team members
• Complete a take-home task relevant to the actual work you’d be doing
• A team and technical interview (60 minutes) with 2 of your future team members

We encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds to apply. We also understand how stressful interviews can be. Let us know if there is anything we can do to improve the process so you can demonstrate your skills. To do so, contact Magdalena Milecka at magdalena.milecka@alcemy.tech.

Note: We cannot offer relocation support for this position, and due to regulations, you need to be enrolled in a German university.

For the past two years, we have been dedicated to enhancing the diversity and inclusivity of our company. We have organized diversity workshops and established a DEI workgroup. By actively collecting feedback, educating our team, and considering new ideas, we have implemented several key improvements:

• Flexible work schedules to help you balance your job with your personal life.
• Access to nilo.health, a comprehensive mental well-being platform that provides 1-to-1 sessions with psychologists, group sessions, and self-guided tools, including sessions with representatives of minorities.
• A diverse team to work with. We have team members across different age profiles, ethnicities, religions, gender identities, and orientations.
• No mandatory vacation periods: use your time off for religious holidays, special events, or however you see fit.
• Collecting feedback from team members during 1:1 meetings with team leaders, AMA sessions with the founders, and through regular engagement surveys.

We’re committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels valued and included. Our journey toward diversity, equity, and inclusion is ongoing, and we’re excited about the progress we’ll make.

We are alcemy, a Berlin-based startup focused on machine learning for the cement- and concrete supply chain. alcemy was founded in October 2018 by Rob, who built the ML behind FlixBus dynamic ticket fares, and Leo, a concrete engineer, who knows cement inside out as his family has been making it for almost hundred years by now. We are backed by some of the most prestigious VC funds in Europe (La Famiglia, First Minute Capital, and LocalGlobe) and want to further grow our exceptional team.