From the listing
About the role
Mode is a fast-growing technology company building businesses at the intersection of AI, data, mobile apps, and digital experiences. Its portfolio of mobile apps and digital products reaches 100M+ monthly active users across a global audience.
Mode.Inc is looking for a DevOps / Network Engineer to help take ownership of the infrastructure behind its newly acquired VPN product. You will join a small engineering team operating, stabilizing, and evolving the product after acquisition, with the opportunity to support additional acquired products over time.
You will inherit a live production environment and progressively make it more reliable, automated, secure, and cost-efficient, helping keep a fast, private, and censorship-resistant service online for users around the world.
What you'll do
- Run and evolve a globally distributed VPN network spanning multiple cloud and hosting providers, the AWS-based control plane and backend services, and infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, and deployment tooling.
- Work closely with the Engineering Manager and backend/mobile engineers, owning the infrastructure and networking domain while partnering on product delivery and operational reliability.
- Document the existing environment and systematically replace manual runbooks with code and automation.
- Use AI coding and agentic tools to accelerate infrastructure development, investigation, documentation, and operational automation, with review and verification before changes reach production.
- Deliver well-tested, version-controlled infrastructure changes in 2-week sprints, with continuous, safe deployments and rollback paths.
- Manage uptime, latency, connection success rate, capacity, and cost per active user.
- Own production operations, troubleshoot incidents, participate in on-call (24/7) support, identify root causes, and automate recurring operational problems.
- In the first 30–60 days, understand the acquired VPN product architecture; map cloud/hosting providers, VPN nodes, control plane, dependencies, and operational tooling; identify critical reliability, security, and cost risks; close knowledge gaps; establish ownership and operational runbooks; and assure 100% product uptime.
- Within 90–180 days, reduce manual operational work, improve monitoring, alerting, and incident response, establish reliable CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code practices where missing, and improve VPN availability, connection success, and operational efficiency.
- Become the clear technical owner of the VPN infrastructure domain, with uptime at world class market levels for similar products.
What they're looking for
- 5+ years of professional DevOps, SRE, or network engineering experience running production infrastructure in an agile environment.
- Hands-on experience with AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS/PostgreSQL, Route 53, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch) plus at least one additional provider such as DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hetzner, or Linode.
- Infrastructure as Code and configuration management experience with Terraform and Ansible.
- Docker and container orchestration or fleet management for many small nodes across providers.
- Linux system administration and networking: iptables/nftables, WireGuard, routing, NAT, DNS, TLS/certificates, and traffic shaping.
- Observability and alerting: Datadog (or Prometheus/Grafana), Cloudflare, log aggregation, on-call and incident response.
- CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions or similar, including automated testing, deployment safety, and rollback.
- Scripting and automation in Python, Go, or Bash.
- Hands-on experience operating VPN, proxy, or networking infrastructure in production, with a strong understanding of server provisioning, configuration and key management, health monitoring, failover, and network performance.
- Deep understanding of DNS and domain management, CDN/edge (Cloudflare), IP reputation, geo-distribution, and strategies for resilience against blocking and provider outages.
- Security fundamentals: secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or SSM), encryption in transit and at rest, least-privilege IAM, vulnerability scanning, and hardening of public-facing servers.
- Demonstrated day-to-day use of AI agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot agents to write and review infrastructure code, automate runbooks, and investigate incidents, with strong judgment on verifying AI-generated output before production.
Nice to have
- Experience with WireGuard, Shadowsocks, OpenVPN, or IKEv2/IPsec technologies at scale is strongly preferred.
- Experience with censorship-circumvention technologies and traffic obfuscation (Shadowsocks plugins, V2Ray/Xray, obfs4, domain fronting) and operating in restrictive network environments.
- Experience with userspace network stacks (lwIP, gVisor netstack) or Go-based networking tooling (wireguard-go).
- Strong plus: experience taking over or integrating infrastructure from another company, including unfamiliar cloud environments, accounts, vendors, monitoring, CI/CD, and operational processes.
- Kubernetes, Nomad, or similar orchestration; Packer for image building.
- Self-managed databases (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis) and backup / disaster recovery design.
- Cloud cost optimization across multiple providers and FinOps practices.
- Compliance program experience (SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA) and handling law-enforcement / data requests for a privacy product.
- Familiarity with mobile app release pipelines (Fastlane, Bitrise, Xcode Cloud) and backend stacks in Go, Python, and Node.js.
Benefits, as listed
The hot takeJeff's read on Mode Mobile
Here's the positives I've found on Mode Mobile:
- Strong Glassdoor score (4.2).
- Clear remote work policy.
They're global: "Our team works remotely around the 🌎, with members in the U.S., Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, India, and more."
Here's the negatives I've gleaned:
"We operate at startup speed"...usually translates to burnout in my experience.
"A fast-moving, supportive, global remote environment"...2/3 of this is good, "fast-moving" is always a concern.
They talk a lot more about their company rather than why you should work there. SELL ME!