Lead Engineer, Cloud Operations

Avathon Government; Pleasanton (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Avathon is hiring a Lead Engineer, Cloud Operations to own how the platform runs in production across GCP, AWS, and Azure. This hands-on role leads reliability, security, cost and deployment, with on-call duties and runbooks.

You will design infrastructure, write automation, and set operating standards for the engineering organization. The ideal candidate has 8+ years in cloud infrastructure or SRE, 3+ years leading engineers, and deep Kubernetes and IaC experience.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE or DevOps; 3+ years leading engineers.
• Hands-on with two of GCP, AWS, Azure; production Kubernetes at scale.
• Experience with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines; strong security awareness.

Responsibilities

• Own uptime, performance and incident response for SaaS and customer deployments.
• Define SLOs, monitoring and alerting across services and data pipelines.
• Lead multi-cloud infra design and automation; manage CI/CD and releases.
• Mentor team and collaborate with product, data, and ML teams.

Skills

Leadership

Cloud platforms

Kubernetes at scale

Observability tooling

Scripting (Python/Go/Bash)

Incident response & calm communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field

Tools

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines, Argo CD)

Kubernetes tooling (Helm)

Observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK)

Elasticsearch / PostgreSQL / streaming

Job description

Who We Are & Why Join Us

Avathon is the leading Industrial AI autonomy platform, helping customers across heavy industries – energy, mining, manufacturing, aerospace, defense, and logistics – accelerate the journey toward autonomous operations. Our platform is built on a Computational Knowledge Graph foundation that contextualizes and connects operational data across siloed systems, bringing together time series, structured, unstructured, and machine vision data to power AI-driven applications in asset performance management, supply chain intelligence, visual AI, and global trade management. With capabilities spanning digital twins, normal behavior modeling, natural language processing, and computer vision, Avathon delivers real-time predictive intelligence and agentic decision‑making at industrial scale.

Cutting-Edge AI Innovation – Join a team at the forefront of AI, developing groundbreaking solutions that shape the future. High‑Growth Environment – Thrive in a fast‑scaling startup where agility, collaboration, and rapid professional growth are the norm. Meaningful Impact – Work on AI‑driven projects that drive real change across industries and improve lives.

Learn more at: avathon.com

We are hiring a Lead Engineer, Cloud Operations to own how the Avathon platform runs in production. Our applications (Asset Performance Management, Supply Chain, Global Trade Management and Machine Vision) and the shared data, model and intelligence layers underneath them run across GCP, AWS and Azure, in customer-managed Kubernetes clusters, and on edge deployments at remote and air‑gapped sites. You will lead the team responsible for reliability, security, cost and deployment across all of these environments. This is a hands‑on role. You will design infrastructure, write automation, share on‑call with your team, and set the operating standards the rest of engineering follows.

Responsibilities:

Platform Reliability and Operations

• Own uptime, performance and incident response for our SaaS environments and customer-hosted deployments
• Define SLOs, monitoring and alerting across application services, data pipelines and model serving
• Run incident management and blameless postmortems, and drive fixes to closure
• Build runbooks and on-call practices that let the team support customers across time zones

Infrastructure and Automation

• Design and manage multi-cloud infrastructure on GCP, AWS and Azure using infrastructure as code
• Run and scale Kubernetes (GKE, EKS, AKS) for application services, data pipelines and GPU inference workloads
• Own CI/CD and release processes so teams can ship safely and often, including to single-tenant and on-premise customer environments
• Support edge and air‑gapped deployments of Avathon Data Ingest (ADI), including packaging, upgrades and remote configuration

Security, Compliance and Cost

• Own cloud security baselines: identity and access, network segmentation, secrets, encryption and audit logging
• Support customer security reviews and compliance programs, including requirements for regulated and defense customers
• Track and reduce cloud spend, including GPU and storage, with clear cost allocation by product and customer
• Plan capacity for growth in data volume, tenants and model workloads

Team Leadership

• Lead and grow a team of cloud and DevOps engineers; set priorities, review work and mentor
• Partner with product engineering, data and ML teams on architecture decisions that affect operability
• Work with forward deployed and customer success teams to stand up new customer environments and support go‑lives
• Report on reliability, incidents and cost to engineering leadership

Key Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience
• 8+ years in cloud infrastructure, SRE or DevOps roles, including 3+ years leading engineers
• Deep hands‑on experience with at least two of GCP, AWS and Azure
• Production experience running Kubernetes at scale, including Helm and container tooling
• Strong infrastructure as code skills with Terraform or similar
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines and release automation (GitHub Actions, Bitbucket Pipelines, Argo CD or similar)
• Experience with observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or the ELK stack
• Scripting and automation in Python, Go or Bash
• Working knowledge of cloud security, IAM and network design; experience with SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP or similar programs is a plus
• Experience supporting on‑premise, hybrid or air‑gapped deployments is a strong plus
• Experience operating data platforms (Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, streaming) or GPU and ML workloads is a plus
• Clear communicator who stays calm during incidents

Salary Range: l$160,000-$220,000

Avathon 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, age, pregnancy, genetic information, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other protected category under applicable federal, state, and local laws.

Avathon is committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruiting process. If you need a reasonable accommodation, please contact us to discuss how we can assist you.