Infrastructure Engineer

About Hovercode: Hovercode is a QR code generator and analytics platform trusted by hundreds of thousands worldwide. We’re a small, profitable company based in the UK focused on providing reliable QR code services without engaging in questionable industry practices. Our aim is to partner with businesses using QR codes and short links while maintaining our reputation for dependability.

About The Role: We’re seeking an infrastructure engineer to architect a robust, scalable infrastructure that can confidently handle our next level of growth. This is a contract role (full-time or part-time, remote with a preference for candidates based in Europe) focused on improving our system’s reliability, scalability, and deployment processes.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and implement infrastructure solutions that can reliably handle significant scale increases
• Design systems that improve our current infrastructure’s confidence in handling high loads
• Optimize PostgreSQL database performance (currently bloated with 280GB+ of data)
• Improve background processing efficiency (currently using django_rq and Redis)
• Create a zero-downtime deployment process
• Enhance infrastructure observability
• Lay foundations for SOC2 compliance
• Provide peace of mind to our founder by ensuring the system operates reliably

Required Skills and Qualifications:

• Proven experience designing and scaling infrastructure systems
• Understanding of tradeoffs between speed, reliability, and cost
• Ability to quickly grasp our current stack (Django, PostgreSQL, Redis, Ansible, Kubernetes, Go)
• Experience with similar system optimization challenges
• Clean, pragmatic problem-solving approach
• Ability to balance deep technical solutions with simplicity
• Contract-based or flexible work arrangements welcome

Current Challenges:

• Background queues frequently back up under high load
• Large PostgreSQL database requires optimization
• Analytics-heavy pages are slow and need tuning
• Current setup works but lacks confidence in scalability

Company Details: Hovercode provides a QR code generator and analytics platform trusted globally. We’re a small UK-based company focused on delivering reliable services without engaging in questionable industry practices. Our infrastructure currently runs on DigitalOcean with Django applications, managed PostgreSQL and Redis, and uses Ansible for deployment.

What We Offer:

• Competitive contract rates (negotiable based on experience)
• Meaningful work on a platform with real-world impact
• Remote-first flexibility
• Opportunity to see immediate impact on critical systems
• Professional environment with a focus on clean solutions

Application Process: Interested candidates should email ramy@hovercode.com with:

1. A brief introduction
2. Relevant experience
3. Day rate expectations
4. Brief overview of how you would approach our scaling challenges

If selected, you’ll join a short call and begin immediately tackling our priority: solving the queue backup problem.