Senior DevOps Cloud Infrastructure Tech Lead

Devspace; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Devspace is seeking a hands-on Senior DevOps Cloud Infrastructure Tech Lead to guide reliability, security, automation, and evolution of our cloud platform. You will design and operate AWS, Kubernetes, IaC, CI/CD, and observability, partnering with engineering, security, QA, and product teams to raise service reliability and reduce toil.

You will coach engineers, establish standards, build self-service tooling, manage deployments, and ensure secure, auditable change control while controlling

Qualifications

• Significant DevOps/SRE/cloud infra experience with senior ownership.
• Strong hands-on AWS, Kubernetes and cloud security knowledge.
• Experience designing and maintaining Terraform with reusable modules.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and release controls.
• Clear written and verbal communication to engineers and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define the platform DevOps roadmap, standards and reference patterns.
• Lead design reviews on reliability, security, scalability and cost.
• Build self-service capabilities for provisioning environments and releases.
• Mentor engineers, enforce code-review practices and share knowledge.
• Coordinate changes across application, infra, data and security teams.

Skills

AWS expertise

Kubernetes

Terraform IaC

GitHub Actions

CI/CD pipelines

Python/Bash

Security best practices

Incident response

Tools

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Docker

Kubernetes

Helm

AWS

Artifactory

Job description

Our client is a leading life sciences and technology company that supplies a broad range of analytical instruments, laboratory equipment, reagents, software and services used in scientific research, healthcare, biotechnology and pharmaceutical manufacturing worldwide. Its mission is to enable customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer by supporting breakthroughs in areas from life-sciences research and clinical diagnostics to complex analytical challenges and drug development.

They offer a wide range of scientific software products that help laboratories manage, analyze and automate data and workflows. Their portfolio includes enterprise lab informatics platforms with Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS), Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN) and data management tools.

Senior DevOps Cloud Infrastructure Tech Lead

Role summary

We are seeking a hands-on Senior DevOps / Cloud Infrastructure Tech Lead to lead the reliability, security, automation, and evolution of the cloud platform and delivery practices behind CTFS. This role combines technical leadership with practical engineering: designing and maintaining AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes platforms, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, release controls, observability, and production operations. The successful candidate will partner with application, data, security, QA, and product teams to make delivery safer and more repeatable, reduce operational toil, improve service reliability, and establish clear engineering standards. The role is expected to coach engineers and guide technical decisions while remaining capable of troubleshooting complex infrastructure and deployment issues directly.

What you will do

Technical leadership and platform engineering

• Define and communicate the platform and DevOps technical roadmap, standards, and reference patterns.
• Lead design reviews and make pragmatic decisions about reliability, scalability, security, maintainability, and cost.
• Build reusable self-service capabilities that help engineering teams provision environments and release software safely.
• Mentor engineers, establish code-review practices, and share operational knowledge across teams.
• Coordinate dependencies and changes across application, infrastructure, data, security, and enterprise platform teams.

Cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes

• Design, provision, operate, and improve AWS environments using infrastructure as code.
• Operate and evolve Amazon EKS clusters and Kubernetes workloads, including access control, namespaces, workload configuration, scaling, upgrades, ingress, networking, and recovery.
• Build and maintain reusable Terraform modules and environment configurations for cloud resources such as VPC/networking, IAM, EKS, RDS, load balancers, API Gateway, storage, messaging, schedulers, and monitoring.
• Manage infrastructure state, plans, changes, drift, and environment separation through reviewed, auditable workflows.
• Establish secure configuration and secrets‑management practices using AWS IAM, OIDC, AWS Secrets Manager or Parameter Store, and approved enterprise systems.
• Plan and execute platform upgrades, capacity changes, resilience improvements, backup and restore exercises, and disaster‑recovery readiness.

CI/CD and release engineering

• Own and improve GitHub Actions pipelines and reusable workflows for application builds, tests, infrastructure validation, security checks, image publication, and environment deployments.
• Maintain secure, reliable CI runners, including self-hosted or self-hosted or ephemerally runner infrastructure where appropriate.
• Standardize container build, tagging, provenance, vulnerability scanning, and promotion of immutable artifacts through environments.
• Strengthen release controls through branch and environment protection, least‑privilege workflow permissions, approval gates, rollback paths, and deployment verification. Improve pipeline speed, reliability, diagnostics, maintainability, and developer experience.
• Support GitFlow or another agreed branching and release model, and ensure pipeline behavior matches the documented release process.

Reliability, operations, and security

• Define and improve service‑level indicators, service‑level objectives, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, and operational readiness criteria.
• Lead or support incident response, root‑cause analysis, post‑incident learning, and corrective‑action tracking.
• Improve observability across infrastructure and services through actionable metrics, logs, traces, and events.
• Apply secure‑by‑default practices for identity, access, network boundaries, container and dependency security, encryption, auditability, and vulnerability remediation.
• Embed infrastructure and container security checks into pull‑request and release workflows, and manage policy exceptions transparently.
• Partner with security, privacy, quality, and compliance stakeholders to provide reliable evidence of change controls and operational processes.
• Monitor and optimize cloud and platform costs without compromising reliability or security.
• Work with software teams to improve application deployability, health checks, graceful shutdown, resource requests and limits, scaling, configuration, and failure recovery.
• Help teams diagnose production and non‑production issues across application, Kubernetes, cloud, network, database, and external‑service boundaries.
• Participate in capacity planning, performance readiness, release readiness, and production change reviews.
• Maintain accurate architecture diagrams, platform documentation, operational procedures, and onboarding materials.

Required qualifications

• Significant professional experience in DevOps, SRE, cloud infrastructure, or platform engineering, including senior‑level ownership of production systems.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: ability to set direction, make sound trade‑offs, mentor engineers, and coordinate delivery across teams.
• Strong hands‑on experience with AWS services and cloud security fundamentals, including IAM, networking, compute, storage, load balancing, monitoring, and managed Kubernetes.
• Strong production experience with Kubernetes and container operations, preferably Amazon EKS, plus Docker or an equivalent container runtime/build workflow.
• Strong experience designing and maintaining Terraform infrastructure as code, including reusable modules, remote state, environment separation, plans, reviews, and safe change practices.
• Experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions or a comparable platform, including reusable workflows, secrets, permissions, artifact handling, and deployment controls.
• Experience with Helm and Kubernetes workload deployment and configuration.
• Proficiency in at least one automation language such as Python, Bash, or PowerShell, and comfort reading application code and deployment manifests.
• Practical knowledge of production operations: monitoring and alerting, incident response, troubleshooting, rollback, backup and recovery, capacity, and resilience.
• Strong understanding of identity and access management, least privilege, secrets handling, network security, and secure software supply chains.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical risks and operational decisions to engineering and business stakeholders.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with JFrog Artifactory or another enterprise artifact and container registry; experience with immutable artifact promotion and software supply‑chain provenance.
• Experience with GitHub self‑hosted or ephemerally runners and AWS services such as EC2 Spot, Lambda, SQS, SSM, and CloudWatch.
• Experience with PostgreSQL or managed relational databases, backup and restore strategies, performance fundamentals, and database change coordination.
• Experience with API Gateway, ALB/NLB, Route 53, VPC design, private connectivity, WAF, and event‑driven AWS services.
• Experience with infrastructure and container security scanning or policy‑as‑code tools such as Checkov, Trivy, tfsec, OPA/Conftest, or equivalent.
• Experience with observability platforms and standards such as CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or an enterprise equivalent.
• Experience operating systems with formal release governance, audit requirements, regulated data, or validated change processes.
• Experience with progressive delivery, GitOps, or deployment tools such as Argo CD or Flux.
• Relevant cloud or Kubernetes certifications are welcome but are not a substitute for practical production experience.

Current CTFS engineering environment

The role will work with a codebase and infrastructure estate that currently includes the following technologies in checked‑in repository configuration:

• Cloud and infrastructure: AWS; Terraform; reusable Terraform modules; VPC/networking; EKS; RDS; IAM; API Gateway; ALB/NLB; S3; SQS/SNS; EventBridge; Lambda; CloudWatch; SSM.
• Containers and platform: Docker; Kubernetes; Amazon EKS; Helm charts and environment‑specific values.
• CI/CD and source control: GitHub Actions; shared/reusable workflow definitions; environment deployment workflows; self‑hosted runner infrastructure, including an ephemerally runner design using SQS, Lambda, and EC2 Spot.
• Artifact and security tooling: JFrog Artifactory/container‑registry references in service Helm configuration; Checkov infrastructure scanning with SARIF upload; Terraform formatting and validation; Python linting workflows; CodeQL workflow definitions.
• Application and data interfaces: Python services; React UI; PostgreSQL; Snowflake; Databricks model‑serving endpoints; Microsoft Entra ID; selected external integrations.

The exact execution path varies between repositories and workflow definitions. The successful candidate should assess and help standardize the supported paths, and verify live environment behavior before treating checked‑in configuration as deployed state. Additional technology experience that would strengthen the platform The following are valuable capabilities for a mature senior platform role. They are not represented here as mandatory components of the current CTFS stack:

• GitOps‑based deployment management, such as Argo CD or Flux.
• Metrics, logs, and tracing built around Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry, or equivalent enterprise tooling.
• Policy‑as‑code and admission controls, such as OPA/Gatekeeper or Kyverno.
• Software supply‑chain security, including SBOM generation, image signing, provenance attestations, and automated dependency/container vulnerability management.
• Progressive delivery patterns such as canary or blue‑green releases, automated rollback, and deployment health analysis.
• SRE practices including service‑level objectives, error budgets, operational toil reduction, and blameless post incident reviews.

Measures of success

• Teams can provision and change infrastructure through reviewed, repeatable,