DevOps Manager: AWS, Kubernetes, SRE Lead

Requirements 8+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, infrastructure, or platform engineering, with at least 2 years leading or managing engineers (formal or tech-lead capacity)

• Deep, hands-on AWS experience across compute, networking, IAM, data, and observability services; comfortable designing for multi-account, multi-region SaaS
• Strong production experience with Kubernetes (preferably EKS), including upgrades, autoscaling, and securing multi-tenant clusters
• Demonstrated hands on operations experience with PostgreSQL at scale — query and index tuning, replication, HA/failover, backups, and version upgrades — and with Elasticsearch / OpenSearch (cluster sizing, shard strategy, ingest tuning, and incident response)
• Working knowledge of additional datastores commonly used in SaaS: Redis, Kafka or other message brokers, and object storage; comfortable evaluating tradeoffs between managed services (RDS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MSK, OpenSearch Service) and self-managed options
• Proficient with Terraform and modern IaC patterns; clear opinions on module design, state management, and PR-driven workflows
• Solid scripting and automation skills in at least one of Python, Go, or Bash
• Track record of designing and operating CI/CD pipelines at scale (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, or similar)
• Experience running production workloads under SOC 2 or comparable compliance frameworks; comfortable partnering with Security on audits and remediation
• Excellent communication and stakeholder skills; able to translate infrastructure tradeoffs into language product, finance, and customer teams understand
• (Desirable) Experience supporting AI/ML or data heavy SaaS workloads (GPU fleets, vector stores, large async pipelines)
• (Desirable) Familiarity with service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) and progressive delivery (Argo Rollouts, feature flags)
• (Desirable) Background scaling FinOps practices and managing cloud spend at $5M+ annual run-rate
• (Desirable) Experience operating multitenant SaaS with strict data isolation requirements for enterprise finance customers
• (Desirable) Exposure to multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environments (Azure, GCP)

What the job involves As Manager, DevOps you will lead a devops team responsible for the AWS-based infrastructure, Kubernetes platform, CI/CD systems, production datastores (PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, and more), and observability stack that power AppZen

• You'll set technical direction, coach engineers, partner closely with Product Engineering and Security, and stay close enough to the work to tune a slow Postgres query, debug an Elasticsearch cluster under load, write Terraform, or review a Helm chart yourself
• This is a builder-manager role. We expect roughly 60% leadership and delivery management, and 40% hands-on technical contribution
• Manage, coach, and grow a team of 3-6 DevOps and platform engineers; own hiring, performance, growth plans, and 1:1s
• Set quarterly priorities aligned to engineering and business goals; communicate progress and risk clearly to leadership
• Build a healthy on-call culture: balanced rotations, blameless postmortems, and continuous reduction of toil
• Own the architecture, cost, and reliability of AppZen's AWS footprint across multiple regions and accounts
• Drive infrastructure-as-code standards using Terraform; champion modular, reviewable, version-controlled infrastructure
• Partner with Security and Compliance on SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and customer audit requirements; harden IAM, network, and secrets management
• Manage cloud spend: visibility, forecasting, and ongoing optimization (Savings Plans, rightsizing, multi-tenant efficiency)
• Hands on ownership of PostgreSQL in production: schema reviews, index and query tuning, vacuum/bloat management, replication, failover, point-in-time recovery, and major-version upgrades (RDS / Aurora)
• Run and scale Elasticsearch / OpenSearch clusters: shard and index design, JVM and heap tuning, snapshot strategy, hot-warm tiers, and incident response under heavy ingest or query load
• Operate supporting datastores such as Redis (caching, queues), Kafka or SQS/SNS (streaming and async), and S3-backed data lakes; define patterns for high availability, durability, and disaster recovery
• Partner with engineering on capacity planning, performance benchmarking, data tier cost optimization, backup/restore drills, and customer data isolation for multi-tenant workloads
• Operate and improve our EKS-based Kubernetes platform: cluster lifecycle, autoscaling, multi tenancy, and workload isolation
• Define golden paths for service teams using Helm, Kustomize, and GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD or Flux
• Set patterns for service mesh, ingress, and zero-downtime deployments
• Lead the design of internal developer platform capabilities so product teams can ship safely and quickly without infra friction
• Maintain and improve build, test, and deploy pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD); enforce supply-chain security and artifact provenance
• Drive measurable improvements in DORA metrics: lead time, deploy frequency, change failure rate, and MTTR
• Own the observability stack (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry); ensure consistent metrics, logs, and traces across services
• Define and operationalize SLOs and error budgets in partnership with service owners
• Lead incident command for high-severity events and convert learnings into durable systemic fixes

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