Senior DevOps Engineer — AWS, CI/CD & AI-Driven Ops

AHEAD; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision Insurance

401(k)

Paid company holidays

Paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

AHEAD is seeking a curious and pragmatic Senior DevOps Engineer to join our DevOps team and help build and run the cloud foundation behind Hatch, our flagship platform, and the rest of our application portfolio. We operate on AWS, with CloudFormation, GitLab CI/CD, and strong emphasis on automation, security, and reliability.

You will work across deployment automation, cost optimization, incident response, and platform reliability, collaborating with software engineers to deliver resilient

Qualifications

• 5+ years in DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering with deep hands-on AWS experience.
• Strong infrastructure-as-code skills. CloudFormation usage; Terraform experience is a plus.
• Proven track record building and running CI/CD pipelines for production systems; GitLab CI experience is a plus.
• Observability tooling experience, ideally Datadog: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting.
• Cloud security fundamentals: IAM, encryption, least-privilege design; SOC2 or similar compliance experience a plus.
• Contain erized workloads: Docker and Amazon ECS on Fargate; Kubernetes experience a plus.
• Hands-on DB experience in production: SQL Server and PostgreSQL on AWS.
• Methodical troubleshooting of live prod problems; Elixir/BEAM or JVM experience a plus.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language; comfortable with AI development tools.
• Strong judgment under pressure; effective on-call and root cause follow-up.
• Clear, direct communication with engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Curiosity and drive to learn and shape how the team builds and operates.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve our AWS environments, managed as IaC with CloudFormation.
• Build and maintain GitLab CI/CD pipelines from commit to production.
• Build out Datadog observability: monitoring, alerting, dashboards, signals of platform behavior.
• Strengthen security posture: IAM, encryption, network design, least-privilege, SOC2 support.
• Automate routine tasks from environment provisioning to deployments and ops chores.
• Share on-call duties, lead incident response and postmortems, drive fixes.
• Troubleshoot live production issues across stack: containers, runtime, DB load, networks.
• Support databases on Amazon RDS (SQL Server) and Aurora PostgreSQL: performance, backups, upgrades.
• Monitor cost and performance; optimize as platforms grow.
• Collaborate with software engineers to make platform easy to build on; mentor ops team.

Skills

AWS

CI/CD

Datadog

Security

Scripting

On-call

Communication

AI tools

Tools

CloudFormation

Terraform

GitLab CI

Datadog

Docker

ECS on Fargate

Kubernetes

SQL Server / PostgreSQL on AWS

Job description

AHEAD is seeking a curious and pragmatic Senior DevOps Engineer to join our DevOps team and help build and run the cloud foundation behind Hatch, our flagship platform, and the rest of our application portfolio. We operate on AWS, with CloudFormation, GitLab CI/CD, and strong emphasis on automation, security, and reliability.

You will work across deployment automation, cost optimization, incident response, and platform reliability, collaborating with software engineers to deliver resilient