DevOps Lead

Sardine; Austin (TX); Remote; USD 180,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking company as a DevOps Lead, where you'll play a vital role in enhancing infrastructure and platform tooling. This hands-on leadership position involves collaborating with engineers to ensure reliable, scalable, and efficient systems. You'll design CI/CD pipelines, improve observability, and drive performance enhancements while working in a remote-first culture that values flexibility and ownership. If you're passionate about shaping the future of DevOps and thrive in a dynamic environment, this opportunity is perfect for you!

Benefits

Generous compensation in cash and equity

Flexible paid time off

Health insurance, dental, and vision coverage

401k matching

MacBook Pro delivered to your door

Home office setup stipend

Monthly meal stipend

Annual health and wellness stipend

Annual Learning stipend

Unlimited access to financial advisory

Qualifications

• 6+ years in DevOps or SRE roles, ideally in startups.
• Proficiency in Python or Go with strong engineering fundamentals.
• Experience with Kubernetes and CI/CD pipeline development.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve DevOps and platform engineering functions.
• Design and maintain secure CI/CD pipelines for rapid iterations.
• Improve observability and drive cost-efficiency across infrastructure.

Skills

DevOps

Python

Go

Kubernetes

CI/CD Pipelines

Debugging Complex Systems

Observability Tools

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Datadog

GCP

Terraform

ArgoCD

Helm

Job description

Who we are:

We are a leader in fraud prevention and AML compliance. Our platform uses device intelligence, behavior biometrics, machine learning, and AI to stop fraud before it happens. Today, over 300 banks, retailers, and fintechs worldwide use Sardine to stop identity fraud, payment fraud, account takeovers, and social engineering scams. We have raised $145M from world-class investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Activant, Visa, Experian, FIS, and Google Ventures.

Our culture:

• We have hubs in the Bay Area, NYC, Austin, and Toronto. However, we maintain a remote-first work culture. #WorkFromAnywhere

• We hire talented, self-motivated individuals with extreme ownership and high growth orientation.

• We value performance and not hours worked. We believe you shouldn't have to miss your family dinner, your kid's school play, friends get-together, or doctor's appointments for the sake of adhering to an arbitrary work schedule.

Location:

• Remote - US or Canada

• From Home / Beach / Mountain / Cafe / Anywhere!

• We are a remote-first company with a globally distributed team. You can find your productive zone and work from there.

About the Role:

As a DevOps Lead at Sardine, you'll play a critical role in evolving our infrastructure and platform tooling to support a growing engineering team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you’ll drive key initiatives across deployment, observability, and developer productivity.

You’ll work closely with application engineers, QA, and cross-functional stakeholders to ensure our systems are reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient. The role involves building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, improving system observability, optimizing cloud usage, and strengthening our platform’s resilience. While we have core tools in place, we’re looking for someone who can both own and elevate them by identifying gaps, improving automation, and proactively driving improvements.

This is an ideal role for someone who brings deep technical expertise, thrives in high-ownership environments, and is excited to shape the future of DevOps.

What you'll be doing:

• Own and evolve our DevOps and platform engineering function, from build and deployment pipelines to monitoring, infrastructure as code, and cost optimization.

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines that are secure, scalable, and built to support rapid product iterations without sacrificing stability.

• Improve observability via Datadog, GCP, and custom dashboards.

• Enable developer productivity by creating internal tooling, reusable modules, and simplifying infrastructure for other engineering teams.

• Drive cost-efficiency and performance improvements across our infrastructure.

• Help teams define and measure SLOs, SLIs, and SLAs, setting the standard for how we think about system health and reliability.

• Play a key role in shaping our engineering culture, DevOps best practices, and influencing our long-term infrastructure roadmap.

• Work cross-functionally with backend eng, security, finance, and other teams.

What you'll need:

• 6+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or software engineering roles, ideally in high-growth startup environments.

• Proficiency in Python or Go, with strong software engineering fundamentals.

• Proven ownership of production infrastructure and platform tooling, with strong debugging skills and the ability to troubleshoot complex distributed systems.

• Deep experience with Kubernetes and tools like ArgoCD, Helm, and Terraform.

• Familiarity with GCP (preferred) or other major cloud providers, with a focus on cost and performance optimization.

• Strong experience building CI/CD pipelines and internal developer tooling from the ground up.

• Hands-on experience with observability tools like Prometheus or Datadog, and participation in an on-call rotation.

Compensation: Base pay range of $180,000 - $220,000 + Series C equity with tremendous upside potential + Attractive benefits

The compensation offered for this role will depend on various factors, including the candidate's location, qualifications, work history, and interview performance, and may differ from the stated range.

Benefits we offer:

• Generous compensation in cash and equity

• Early exercise for all options, including pre-vested

• Work from anywhere: Remote-first Culture

• Flexible paid time off, Year-end break, Self care days off

• Health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents - US and Canada specific

• 4% matching in 401k / RRSP - US and Canada specific

• MacBook Pro delivered to your door

• One-time stipend to set up a home office — desk, chair, screen, etc.

• Monthly meal stipend

• Monthly social meet-up stipend

• Annual health and wellness stipend

• Annual Learning stipend

• Unlimited access to an expert financial advisory

Join a fast-growing company with world-class professionals from around the world. If you are seeking a meaningful career, you found the right place, and we would love to hear from you.