Freelance GitLab / DevOps Engineer

Whale is on a growth trajectory and eager to welcome new members to our pod!
As a Ghent-based SaaS company hailing from Belgium, we’re dedicated to becoming the fastest way to get teams aligned.

However, our focus isn’t solely on ourselves. Let’s begin by explaining how becoming a Freelance GitLab/DevOps Engineer at Whale can enhance your professional life:

Becoming a pod member means you can count on:

  • A long-term freelance collaboration with meaningful product impact
  • A modern cloud-native stack (GCP, GitLab, Kubernetes, Docker)
  • Flexibility and autonomy in how you organize your work
  • A healthy working environment with flexible working hours and hybrid remote work
  • A caring team who’s there every step of the way

You’ll fit right in if:

  • You have 5+ years of DevOps/SRE/platform engineering experience in production SaaS environments
  • You have deep expertise in GitLab CI/CD and a proven track record of significantly reducing pipeline duration
  • You can identify and remove CI bottlenecks through caching, parallelization, DAG optimization, runner strategy, and test splitting
  • You are highly experienced with Kubernetes in production (deployments, reliability, scaling, troubleshooting)
  • You have strong hands-on experience with GCP
  • You have advanced experience with Docker image optimization and build performance
  • You are comfortable writing and maintaining automation scripts in bash
  • You can support developers working in TypeScript and Python environments
  • You understand infrastructure as code and reproducible environments
  • You have experience setting up monitoring, alerting, and incident response workflows
  • You have experience in maintaining and deploying production environments
  • You have experience with Continuous Integration and Deployments
  • You have a strong understanding of Linux in production environments, incident response, and release reliability

We’re looking for someone with a strong builder mindset and a history of delivering measurable infrastructure and CI/CD improvements.

What you’ll be doing:

Together with the product & engineering team, your mission is to significantly speed up our delivery pipelines and improve developer productivity. You’ll audit the current setup, define a performance plan, and implement concrete optimizations across GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure. You’ll own execution end-to-end, including measurement, rollout, and continuous improvement.

The mission you’ll join:

Whale is on a mission to becoming the fastest way to get teams aligned. Offering an incredibly easy to use piece of software, Whale is basically the organization’s brain: it stores its procedures and helps employees to learn them.