Senior DevOps Engineer

About Mainspring

Mainspring Energy manufactures and delivers fuel-flexible, low-emissions local power solutions that rapidly add new capacity and deliver reliable, affordable, and sustainable electric power. The company began commercial shipments of its Mainspring Linear Generators in 2020 and today has hundreds of megawatts in advanced development and field operations for leading Fortune 500 companies, data centers, and utilities. Mainspring also partners with global energy leaders including AEP, NextEra Energy Resources, Schneider Electric, and more.

The core values that ground our work, guide our decisions, and connect us together:

• Pragmatic Optimism
• Excellence without Ego
• Proactive Collaboration

We are seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to act as a technical pillar of our platform team. In this role, you will transition from simply maintaining infrastructure to actively designing, building, and scaling it. You will own the lifecycle of several existing and brand-new infrastructure projects, driving architectural decisions, upgrading our CI/CD pipelines, and integrating modern AI-driven workflows and autonomous agents into our platform ecosystem.

As a Senior DevOps Engineer you will work with a high degree of autonomy. While you will collaborate with Staff and Principal Engineers on advanced architectural patterns, you are expected to independently lead projects from conception to production. Your work will directly impact our system's reliability, developer velocity, operational autonomy, and overall engineering efficiency.

System Design & Technical Execution

• Build & Redesign: Lead the creation of new infrastructure projects and drive the comprehensive redesign of aging legacy systems to modern, cloud-native standards
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Architect, write, test, and manage robust IaC templates using Terraform across multi-cloud environments
• Process Modernization: Identify bottlenecks in our engineering workflows and design, document, and implement entirely new processes to optimize our DevOps maturity
• Advanced Automation & Agentic Workflows: Build robust automation frameworks using Python (primary language) and AI agents to automate routine support, maintenance tasks, log analysis, and incident triage, eliminating manual operational toil

Autonomy, Consultation & Leadership

• Independent Execution: Take full ownership of projects. You will be responsible for planning, executing, and deploying your initiatives with minimal daily oversight
• Collaborative Design Reviews: Partner with Staff and Senior Staff Engineers to review architectural designs, ensuring alignment with company standards, advanced patterns, and AI/agent capabilities
• Documentation & Shared Knowledge Champion: Author clear system architecture diagrams and runbooks. Build and maintain centralized AI prompt/skill libraries and tooling to elevate team capabilities

Security, Support & Mentorship

• Vulnerability Management & AI Guardrails: Take a proactive role in triaging complex security issues, defining IAM policies, and establishing safety guardrails and access controls for cloud environments and autonomous AI agents
• Automated Support & Developer Advocacy: Serve as a technical advisor for dev teams, building AI-assisted support tools (e.g., automated troubleshooting agents) to drive developer self-service

Technical Expertise:

• Cloud Architecture: Deep production experience with GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and/or AWS (Amazon Web Services)—ideally both
• Infrastructure as Code: Advanced proficiency in Terraform, including writing modular, reusable, and secure configurations
• CI/CD Pipelines: Deep expertise in constructing and optimizing enterprise-grade pipelines, with a strong preference for GitLab (and/or GitHub)
• Scripting, Software Engineering & AI Integration: Strong software engineering fundamentals in Python, paired with practical experience leveraging AI, LLM tooling, or agentic frameworks (e.g., Google ADK, LangChain, or custom tool-calling agents) for operational automation
• Containers & Orchestration: Production-grade experience managing Kubernetes (K8s) clusters, helm charts, and containerized microservices using docker images
• Serverless & Microservices: Hands-on experience architecting and deploying solutions utilizing AWS Lambdas, GCP Cloud Run, and container automation frameworks

Professional Competencies:

• High Ownership & Accountability: You understand that your technical choices carry a broad blast radius where downtime or misconfigurations result in significant business delays. You design with high availability, self-healing, guardrails, and rollback strategies in mind
• Architectural & AI Pragmatism: You know when to build a custom solution, when to leverage existing cloud-native tools, and how to evaluate AI solutions to solve real operational problems rather than chasing hype
• Strong Communicator: Ability to explain highly technical, low-level cloud concepts clearly to stakeholders, product developers, and business partners

$134,827 - $158,620 a year

This position is onsite at our Menlo Park HQ. The salary will be adjusted to reflect local market conditions based on employee location as well as the experience of the employee. Along with the base salary, Mainspring offers pre-IPO stock options + benefits.

Does your experience not meet all of our posted requirements? Studies have shown that some people are less likely to apply to positions unless they meet every listed requirement. At Mainspring, we are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, flexible, and collaborative environment, so if you want to help us transition the world to clean and affordable electricity, and don’t meet all posted requirements for a particular role, we’d still love to hear from you. Mainspring can sometimes be flexible enough to shift responsibilities for the right person, or otherwise identify open or upcoming roles that may better fit your professional background.

In more traditional words, Mainspring Energy, Inc is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

This compensation and benefits information is based on Mainspring Energy's estimate as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. We generally do not negotiate on salary once we have made an offer. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors that may include location, relevant prior experience and/or education, or particular skills and expertise. New hires joining the company tend to be paid within the starting base pay range noted above, with opportunities to increase pay over time based on development of additional skills, competencies, and company-specific knowledge.