DevOps at a Dublin cloud company: a Slack message from a former colleague was the entire process

Two weeks. Three rounds. One offer. The fastest hire I've ever been involved in, on either side of the table. I wasn't job-hunting. I'd been at my previous company for two years as the second DevOps hire. I liked the team. The infrastructure was a mess, but a manageable mess, and I'd been making it less of one every quarter. A former colleague, someone I'd worked with five years earlier at a very different company, had moved to a Dublin cloud company eight months prior as the engineering manager for the platform team. We'd stayed loosely in touch. On a Monday morning in late autumn he pinged me on Slack: "we're hiring a senior DevOps person for my team, you'd be perfect for it, can we talk?" I said yes mostly out of curiosity. I had no plans to leave, but I was happy to hear what they were doing. The first call was him, forty-five minutes. No formal recruiter screen. He walked me through the team, the stack, the on-call rotation, the salary band, the team's biggest current pain (a Kubernetes upgrade that had been deferred for six months), and what they hoped to ship next quarter. By the end I had a clearer picture of the role than I'd had of any role I'd interviewed for in the previous year. Round two was the head of platform ↓