Senior DevOps Engineer

Ponderosa Talent Group; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Ponderosa Talent Group is partnering with a Seattle Series A startup to hire an experienced infra/DevOps engineer who will own cloud systems in production from day one. The role focuses on AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform, with an emphasis on reliability and end-to-end ownership.

You will drive CI/CD, observability, and incident response while shaping the platform's infrastructure as the team''s first dedicated cloud hire. U.S. citizenship or green card is required.

Qualifications

• Production cloud ownership experience.
• Hands-on AWS and Kubernetes experience.
• Own infra end-to-end as first cloud hire.
• Proficient in Terraform or similar IaC.
• Strong reliability, observability, and CI/CD practices.
• US green card or citizenship required (no visa sponsorship).

Responsibilities

• Own cloud infrastructure end-to-end in production.
• Design, implement, and operate scalable, reliable systems.
• Champion deployment, monitoring, and incident response.

Skills

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD

Observability

Reliability

Cloud Infra Ownership

Tools

EKS

Job description

Ponderosa is currently partnering with a Series A startup in Seattle.

Tech stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform — infra-focused, not tied to a specific backend language.

What We're Looking For

• Strong infrastructure/DevOps engineer with real experience owning cloud systems in production, not just cloud exposure inside a broader engineering role
• Hands-on experience with AWS (EC2, RDS, networking) and Kubernetes (EKS or similar)
• Comfortable owning infrastructure end-to-end as the team's first dedicated cloud infra hire
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or similar)
• Strong operational judgment around reliability — CI/CD, observability, keeping systems live and recoverable
• Green card or U.S. citizenship required (no visa sponsorship)

Their Stack (Nice to Have, Not Required)

• Multi-cloud experience (Azure, GCP)
• Edge Kubernetes (k3s, RKE2) or constrained/disconnected environment experience
• Python or Go
• GovCloud or regulated environment exposure