Senior DevOps Engineer

Art of Problem Solving; San Diego (CA); Hybrid; USD 134,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Art of Problem Solving is seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to join the Platform Group in San Diego. You will lead observability efforts, define useful metrics, run Kubernetes in production, and build CI/CD tooling that speeds safe shipping.

You’ll guide incident responses and promote best practices across engineering. You’ll work in a hybrid, full-time role with a focus on AI-enabled infrastructure improvements and secure, scalable AWS-based platforms.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience in DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, or software engineering, with at least 3 years in infrastructure or operations.
• Operational experience running Kubernetes in production beyond deployment.
• Deep observability experience with a modern observability platform and tooling.
• Experience defining SLOs and helping product teams adopt good observability practices.
• Strong experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and internal tooling.
• Experience designing, securing, and managing scalable AWS infrastructure.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code, preferably Terraform.
• Production-grade coding for tools and automation.
• Track record of leading incident response and turning lessons into lasting improvements.
• AI-forward mindset and curiosity about AI in infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Make our systems more visible by leading observability, logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting initiatives.
• Collaborate with product teams to define meaningful metrics and SLOs.
• Run Kubernetes in production, ensuring reliability, security, and cost-effectiveness.
• Design CI/CD pipelines and self-service tooling for fast, safe product ship.
• Lead incident response and post-mortems to prevent repeats.
• Raise standards for observability, Kubernetes, and developer tooling across teams.
• Explore AI-powered approaches to improve infrastructure and engineering workflows.

Skills

Kubernetes in production

Observability

CI/CD pipelines

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform

Incident response leadership

AI-forward mindset

Communication

Tools

Datadog

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Terraform

AWS

Job description

At AoPS, we are world leaders in teaching advanced mathematics. We train many of the most elite mathematicians in the world, including all members of the US International Math Olympiad team, and we're expanding that same standard of excellence into new subjects and experiences.

AoPS is unique because it is vertically integrated: we develop our own curriculum, run our own physical learning centers, employ teachers, and have a robust and capable product, design, and engineering team. But we've only scratched the surface of what's possible! Behind every lesson, live class, and practice problem is a platform that has to be fast, reliable, and secure for hundreds of thousands of students.

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you'll help build and run that platform. You'll join our Platform Group, the team that owns the infrastructure, developer experience, and core services every AoPS product depends on. Your work will make our systems more visible, more resilient, and easier for every engineer at AoPS to build on.

The Senior DevOps Engineer will:

• Make Our Systems Visible: Take a leading role in our observability practice as our architecture grows more distributed. You'll build the logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting that help engineers catch problems before students do.
• Help Teams Know What to Measure: Work with product engineers to define what "good" looks like for their services, pick the metrics and SLOs that actually matter, and build observability into their work from the start.
• Run Kubernetes in Production: Help operate and evolve our container platform, keeping it reliable, secure, and cost-effective as it grows. You've run it long enough to know where things tend to break and which questions to ask.
• Build Tools Engineers Love: Design CI/CD pipelines and self-service tooling that let product teams ship quickly and safely without waiting on DevOps.
• Lead When Things Break: Lead incident response, find root causes, and run post-mortems that actually prevent the next one. Spot stability risks in application designs before they reach production.
• Raise the Bar: Help shape standards for observability, Kubernetes, and developer tooling across engineering, and help other engineers level up through code reviews and mentorship.
• Push AI Forward: Find ways AI can make our infrastructure smarter and our engineers more effective, and share what you learn with the team.

The ideal candidate has:

• 5+ years of professional experience in DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, or software engineering, with at least 3 of those years focused on infrastructure or operations
• Operational experience running Kubernetes in production, not just deploying to it
• Deep observability experience, including hands-on proficiency with a modern observability platform (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or similar) and building tooling around it
• Experience defining SLOs and helping product teams adopt good observability practices
• Strong experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and internal developer tooling
• Experience designing, securing, and managing scalable infrastructure in AWS
• Proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code, preferably Terraform
• Solid software engineering skills and comfort writing production-quality code for tools and automation
• A track record of leading incident response and turning lessons learned into lasting improvements
• An AI-forward mindset and genuine curiosity about how AI is changing infrastructure and engineering work
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to influence engineering practices across teams

Bonus Points for:

• Experience with event-driven or distributed architectures (message buses, async services)
• Experience managing observability costs or migrating between observability platforms
• Familiarity with Node.js and/or PHP applications, and with MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or Redis
• Experience building or contributing to AI-powered developer tooling
• Experience in EdTech or consumer products

Why Join AoPS:

This is a hybrid full-time position based at our headquarters in San Diego, CA. The full salary range for this position is $134k-$180k. Here are some things you can look forward to:

• Impact: The opportunity to help build and run a platform that is more visible, more resilient, and easier for every engineer to build on.
• Culture: Work and collaborate with an organization filled with builders and life-long learners who strive to discover, inspire, and train the great problem solvers of the next generation
• Flexibility: Casual work environment with a hybrid work week and flexible scheduling
• Benefits: Multiple options for Medical, Dental and Vision plans
• Future Planning: 401K with company match
• Quality of Life: PTO Plan and supportive leadership that gives you the work-life balance you deserve
• Ease of Transition: Relocation bonus (if currently located outside of San Diego)

Please note that employment is contingent on the successful completion of a background check.

Work Authorization:

Please note that in order to be considered for this position you must be legally authorized to work in the US. We are unable to offer sponsorship, including STEM-OPT and H-1B.

About AoPS:

Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) is on a mission to discover, inspire, and train the great problem solvers of the next generation. Since 2003, we have trained hundreds of thousands of the country’s top students, including nearly all the members of the US International Math Olympiad team, through our online school, in-person academies, textbooks, and online learning systems. While our primary focus has been math for most of our history, through the years we have expanded our unique problem solving curriculum into more subjects, such as language arts, science, and computer science.