Job Description

Return | REMOTE | DevOps / Platform engineer | Full-time

Return (https://return.energy) is hiring a DevOps engineer who will build and run the infrastructure behind platforms that accelerate the transition to carbon-free energy. Return's main activity is building and operating industrial-size Battery Energy Storage Systems. Our operations are located in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Spain. You will be making a measurable (country-level) impact on the transition to renewable energy. Return recently raised €300M to support its growth.

While we employ over 120 people, Return's technical team is still small (15 people). Our platform automates processes in energy storage, monitoring, market optimization, sales, project management, procurement, construction, and customer service. Behind it sits a mix of EU cloud and on-site compute at our battery sites, with strict uptime and security requirements.

During the first four years of operation, we laid the foundation for our platforms, and we are ready to scale up. This is why we are looking for an experienced DevOps engineer who can own the full picture: cloud environments, self-hosted infrastructure at our BESS sites, and the operations centers in Amsterdam and Eindhoven from which we run the fleet.

Your primary focus will be to design, automate, and operate the infrastructure that our virtual battery platform runs on. That means EU-only cloud providers for application workloads, hardened on-premise setups at our sites, and the connectivity in between. You will be the person who decides what gets deployed where, and who makes sure it stays up and stays secure.

What we expect:

• Strong opinions on cloud and self-hosted environments, and the experience to back them up. We (will) run on EU providers and also operate physical hardware at our battery sites.

• Practical and fast. We prefer the boring solution that ships this week over the elegant one that ships next quarter.

• Security first. We are ISO 27001 certified and we operate critical energy infrastructure. You should be comfortable with threat modeling, network segmentation, secrets management, audit logging, and the OT/IT boundary.

• Terraform and Ansible as your default tools for infrastructure-as-code and configuration management.

• Kubernetes knowledge is welcome, but not a requirement. If you think we should run k8s, we want to hear the argument. If you think Nomad, plain systemd, or a small fleet of well-managed VMs is a better fit for our scale, we want to hear that argument too. We lean toward simpler setups unless complexity earns its keep.

• Comfortable with PostgreSQL operations, including HA and replication across regions, backups, and recovery drills.

• CI/CD pipeline design and maintenance (we use GitHub Actions today).

• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, structured logging, sensible alerting that does not wake people up for nothing.

• Linux sysadmin fundamentals, networking (VLANs, VPNs, firewalls), and a working understanding of OT environments is a plus. Experience with industrial protocols (OPC-UA, Modbus) or SCADA-adjacent systems is a bonus, not a requirement; we can teach the energy domain.

• You write code. Bash and Python at minimum. Go is a plus since most of our backend is in Go.

Our tech stack/toolset is straightforward: Go, Python, Ruby, PostgreSQL, TigerData, dbt, Dagster, Grafana, Terraform, Ansible, self-hosted + cloud compute. We tend to keep meetings to a minimum in order to provide at least five hours of uninterrupted focus time per day. We practice code reviews and apply automated and manual testing. Our web apps and platforms are often deployed multiple times per day.

Return has offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Hamburg, Munich, Madrid, and Stuttgart. We are very much open to working remotely as long as you live in the EU. Some travel to our battery sites and operations centers is expected, but it is not the day job. Our hiring process is swift but thorough: a brief call to get acquainted and discuss financials, followed by one or more technical interviews, and a paid visit to Amsterdam to meet the team.

The tech team members have co-founded several companies and/or have experience with remote development teams since 2008. They will personally help you through most of the recruiting process (there is no recruiter involved).