DevOps Engineer III

Instant Alliance, LLC; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 68,000 - 97,000; Full time

Job summary

Instant Alliance, LLC in Houston, TX seeks a senior-level technical leader to drive platform reliability, scalability, performance, and cost efficiency. You will own ambiguous production issues, communicate technical risks to leadership, and mentor junior and mid-level engineers while continuously improving operational standards.

The role requires 7+ years in DevOps/SRE/enterprise cloud, strong AWS experience (ECS/EKS/S3/Lambda/IAM), and Terraform/Kubernetes expertise.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure experience.
• 5+ years supporting, troubleshooting, and improving production workloads on AWS.
• Independently diagnose complex issues, lead root-cause analysis, and drive reliable solutions.
• Deep expertise across AWS services: ECS, EKS, S3, Lambda, IAM, networking, logging, and monitoring.
• Preferred: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer (Professional) or AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Professional).

Skills

DevOps

SRE

Cloud infrastructure

AWS

Kubernetes

Containerization

GitOps

Tools

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

ECS

EKS

S3

Lambda

IAM

Job description

Location: Houston, TX
Rate: $60/hr+
Role Overview

We are seeking a senior-level technical leader with deep operational maturity to drive platform reliability, scalability, performance, and cost efficiency. The ideal candidate will take ownership of ambiguous production issues, communicate technical risks and tradeoffs effectively to leadership, and mentor junior and mid-level engineers while continuously improving our operational standards.

Core Technical Requirements

AWS Production Support & Engineering (7+ Years)

• 7+ years of hands-on DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, or cloud infrastructure experience.

• 5+ years supporting, troubleshooting, and improving production workloads specifically on AWS.

• Independently diagnose complex issues, lead root-cause analysis (RCA), and drive reliable solutions.

• Deep expertise across AWS services, including ECS, EKS, S3, Lambda, DocumentDB, DynamoDB, IAM, networking, logging, and monitoring.

• Preferred: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer (Professional) or AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Professional). Strong candidates with Associate-level certifications and significant senior experience will be considered.

Infrastructure as Code & Terraform (5+ Years)

• 5+ years designing, developing, debugging, and maintaining Terraform-based infrastructure for AWS at enterprise scale.

• Must have direct experience provisioning and managing AWS infrastructure, not just consuming prebuilt modules.

• Expected to contribute to module design, reusable patterns, standards, and code reviews for services like EKS, ECS, EC2, S3, and IAM.

• Strong understanding of execution plans, remote state management, resource dependencies, module versioning, and policy controls.

• Expertise in troubleshooting drift and safely applying change automation across production and non-production environments.

• Strong preference for candidates with automated validation, testing, and CI/CD integration experience for infrastructure changes.

Containerization & Kubernetes (5+ Years)

• 5+ years managing containerized workloads.

• 3+ years of hands-on Kubernetes or Amazon EKS experience in production environments.

• Lead production deployments, upgrades, incident resolution, and operational support for K8s/EKS-platforms.

• Manage cluster operations, workload deployment, autoscaling, networking, IAM/RBAC integration, and platform reliability patterns.

• Maintain Helm charts and Kubernetes manifests for repeatable application and platform deployments.

• Troubleshoot distributed applications using Docker, ECS, Kubernetes, or EKS (including service discovery, ingress/load balancing, network policies, and observability integration).

• Expertise in GitOps and CI/CD-driven deployment patterns (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Harness, Argo CD, Flux).

• Preferred: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), or equivalent hands‑on experience.

Operational Maturity & Best Practices

• Proven experience with advanced observability, proactive incident response, and strict change management.

• Implement security hardening, infrastructure automation, and disaster recovery awareness.

• Produce clear, highly maintained runbooks, design notes, and support documentation.