Short company description

About EUMETSAT – Trusted in Space. Essential on Earth.
Since 1986, EUMETSAT, Europe’s meteorological satellite agency, has monitored weather and climate from space. From its headquarters in Darmstadt, Germany, it operates fleets of satellites observing the Earth system and delivers real-time, 24/7 data and imagery to its 30 member states to help protect communities and support critical sectors of their economies.
As it marks its 40th anniversary in 2026, EUMETSAT looks back on four decades of achievements in Earth observation for weather and climate. Today, it plays a central role in the international meteorological satellite system, contributing observations that support forecasting and climate monitoring in its member states and beyond.

Requirements

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE
- IaC proficiency: production experience with Terraform and Ansible (or equivalents), including modules, workspaces/state, and environment promotion across dev/test/stage/prod.
- Systems background: 5+ years of Linux administration in mission-critical environment; solid understanding of networking, storage, and virtualization (e.g., VMware/vSphere) and how these underpin services.
- Security and compliance: integrating SAST/DAST, dependency scanning, SBOM generation, secrets management (e.g., Conjur), image signing, and approvals into delivery workflows.
- CI/CD expertise: hands-on design and operation of pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI/Jenkins/GitHub Actions) with stages for build, test, scan, package, and deploy; blue-green/canary strategies, and rollback.
- Documentation & change: ability to write clear technical documentation and change records supporting safe implementation in a 24/7 environment.
- Collaboration: experience guiding contractors, prioritising work with excellent communication skills.

Responsibilities

EUMETSAT is entering a pivotal phase, with multiple satellite launches and a broad technology refresh across the ground segment. The Computing Service, within the IT Infrastructure & Data Division (I2D), underpins mission-critical processing and commanding of satellites. As our estate evolves, we are standardising software delivery and infrastructure provisioning to increase reliability, velocity, and auditability.
To accelerate this transformation, we seek an Infrastructure Automation Engineer to lead, implement and run modern CI/CD pipelines, evolve the platform and tooling capabilities. The role will drive the transition of existing infrastructure provisioning to Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Reporting to the Computing Service Implementation Lead the successful candidate will work closely with Networking, Storage, Build and Deployment Systems teams on platform-related topics, and collaborate with various teams across departments to support adoption and alignment.
The successful candidate will provide hands‑on technical leadership, ensuring standardisation, enablement, and high‑quality delivery across build, deployment, and operational phases in a 24/7 mission‑critical environment.
DUTIES
- Drive automation and standardisation within Infrastructure Compute Environment.
- Standardise platform tooling: curate and operate shared build runners, artifact repositories, container registries, base images, and golden modules; maintain versioning and lifecycle policies.
- Lead the IaC migration: define the roadmap to transition existing provisioning to IaC (e.g., Terraform/Ansible), including state management, modular standards, environment parity, and documentation.
- Adopt GitOps practices: implement declarative deployments (e.g., Helm/Kustomize with a CD engine such as Argo CD), environment promotion, and change approvals through pull requests.
- Implement DevSecOps controls: integrate SAST/DAST, dependency and container scanning, secrets management, image signing, and policy-as-code into pipelines to meet quality and compliance requirements.
- Enable the CI/CD Infrastructure components aligned to the broader organisational strategic requirements.
- Change management & documentation: produce clear change plans, implementation guides, and verification procedures that meet the expectations of a 24/7 mission-critical environment.
- Contractor & stakeholder collaboration: direct and quality-assure contributions from internal service contractors; translate user needs from programmes into secure, efficient technical designs and procurement inputs.
QUALIFICATIONS
- University degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline (or equivalent professional experience).
- Relevant certifications are a plus (e.g., HashiCorp Terraform Associate, CKA/CKAD, ITIL Foundation).
LANGUAGES
- Candidates must be able to work effectively in English.

Other info

EMPLOYMENT CONDITIONS
The initial contract will be of 4 years’ duration, with subsequent 5 year contracts being awarded thereafter, subject to individual performance and organisation requirements. There is no limit to the amount of follow-up contracts a staff member can receive up to the EUMETSAT retirement age of 63 and there are certainly opportunities to establish a long career perspective at EUMETSAT.
This post is graded A2/A4 on the EUMETSAT salary scales. The minimum basic salary for this post is EURO 7,553 per month (net of internal tax but excluding pension contribution and insurances) which may be negotiable on the basis of skills and experience. The salary scale provides for increments on the anniversary of taking up employment, and scales are reviewed by the EUMETSAT Council with effect from 1 January each year. In addition to basic salary, EUMETSAT offers attractive benefits. Further information, including salary details, is available on the EUMETSAT web site.

Benefits

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  Medical subscription
  
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  Dental subscription
  
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  Medical insurance
  
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  Life insurance
  
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  Gym membership
  
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  Private pension