Why this role matters

This is a high-impact, hands-on role. Today the function is a one-person position, and you'll take ownership of platform initiatives while we plan to grow this into a Platform team. You'll help shape how Kanpla runs in production, bring clarity to our distributed services, raise the bar for reliability and security, and enable product teams to ship confidently. Help introduce incident response, on-call rotations, change management processes.

Part of the role is identifying what's most impactful to tackle next and then building the team around the capabilities we're missing.

About Kanpla

We build the platform that powers contract catering across Europe and the US. We're a fast-growing scaleup with an ambitious, energetic engineering team working to reshape the contract catering industry. Our products serve food at over 5,000 locations to more than half a million users, and we have offices in Aarhus, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and London, plus teammates working remotely across Europe. We're investing in a single, robust platform and developer experience so our teams can move faster and with more confidence.

Our current stack

• Cloud: GCP with multiple projects (currently scattered; architectural consolidation is pending). We favor managed cloud solutions.

• Data: Firestore as the primary operational database. PostgreSQL as our analytical store. We're evaluating moving some transactional workloads to Postgres.

• Observability: Multiple tools in use today. Consolidating into a single observability platform is a near-term priority.

• Languages: TypeScript-first.

• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Vercel, container pipelines.

• On-call: None formally today, we'd like your input to evaluate what we need and propose a model together.

First 6 months

We'd expect you to focus on:

1. Observability consolidation: replacing our patchwork of logging and monitoring tools with a single platform (OpenTelemetry-based or similar).

2. GCP project and organization structure: proposing and executing a consolidation plan that simplifies IAM, billing, and day-to-day management.

3. Infrastructure as Code foundation — implementing and maintaining IaC for GCP (Terraform, Terragrunt, or similar), enabling clean separation of environments, reproducible provisioning, and a baseline that future platform work can build on.

Security hardening, multi-region data strategy, and developer workflow improvements will follow, but we'd rather do the first three well than spread you across ten.

Longer-term scope

• Design, build, and operate our observability platform: metrics, tracing, logging, and alerting (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, Google Cloud Operations, or similar).

• Own and improve CI/CD across backend, frontend, and POS projects: GitHub Actions, Vercel workflows, container pipelines.

• Lead technical security: infrastructure hardening, secrets management, secure build pipelines, policy as code. Support compliance efforts (audit evidence, vendor security questionnaires, GCP security posture).

• Improve TypeScript/Node.js deployment patterns and developer workflows: builds, testing, release practices.

• Help evolve our infrastructure to support multiple markets across the EU and the US, including cross-continental data storage patterns (Firestore multi-region, AlloyDB or managed Postgres).

• Manage integrations across Vercel, GitHub, and GCP services (Cloud Run, GKE, Cloud Functions, Firestore, Cloud Storage).

• Evaluate on-call and incident practices and understand where we actually hurt today and propose a pragmatic model appropriate to our stage.

• Mentor engineers on platform best practices, runbooks, and developer tooling.

What we're looking for

Must-haves

• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, Platform, or Site Reliability roles.

• Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform: resource organization, IAM, networking, and compute/database services.

• Experience leading platform consolidation at comparable scale: multiple projects, multiple teams, real production traffic.

• A strong IC mindset. This role is hands-on first. You'll need to get into the code, pipelines, and configs yourself, especially in the early months, not just coordinate others.

• Proven experience with Infrastructure as Code: Terraform or similar.

• Solid experience with CI/CD tooling and practices: GitHub Actions, Vercel, or equivalent.

• Experience building and operating observability for production systems.

• Experience with technical security for cloud and pipelines.

• Comfortable working with TypeScript/Node.js services and developer workflows.

• Excellent communicator who can work across teams and explain technical tradeoffs clearly.

• Thrives in a growing scaleup - pragmatic, autonomous, and collaborative.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with Firestore multi-region setups or AlloyDB.

• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar.

• Experience consolidating multiple GCP projects into a cleaner cloud organization.

• Experience supporting compliance work (SOC2, ISO, or similar) from the infrastructure side.

What we offer

• A high-impact role in a product used by hundreds of thousands of people.

• Flexible hours and the choice to work from Aarhus, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, or London - or fully remote anywhere in Europe.

• A supportive engineering team that values learning and teaching.

• Regular team gatherings and cross-office collaboration.

• Competitive benefits and a clear path to building and leading a Platform team.

Our culture

We move quickly but responsibly. We value curiosity, ownership, and continuous learning. We want someone who'll raise the engineering bar technically and socially, and who'll be thoughtful about adopting new technologies - including AI tooling in our own engineering workflows.

We encourage applications from candidates of all genders and backgrounds. If you're excited by the role but don't match every bullet above, please apply.