Sr. DevOps Engineer

DRH Search; Massachusetts; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

DRH Search is seeking a Sr. DevOps Engineer to join a fast-growing biotech startup with HQ in Cambridge, MA and offices in SF and NYC. The role supports a hybrid model, requiring in-person collaboration twice weekly while allowing remote work three days a week.

You will design scalable cloud infrastructure (AWS), implement IaC, build CI/CD pipelines, and drive reliability, security, and observability across the platform, including data flows and ML components.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• Proven cloud infrastructure design, deployment, and operation in production (AWS).
• Hands-on IaC with Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar to manage repeatable infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure with IaC for reproducible, auditable environments.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines across frontend, backend, and ML services.
• Implement monitoring and alerting to surface issues before customers are affected.
• Drive reliability and incident response, including on-call rotations and PIRs.
• Enforce security and compliance best practices for network, secrets, and data protection.
• Monitor and optimize cloud spend and performance to balance cost with reliability.
• Partner with engineering to scale data infrastructure and ensure backups, DR, and performance.
• Create tooling to improve developer experience and automate deployment workflows.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with software, ML, and product teams to align infra investments.

Skills

Cloud infrastructure

IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation)

CI/CD

Observability & monitoring

Reliability & incident response

Security & compliance awareness

Cost optimization

Database & data flow

Scripting (Python, Bash, Go)

Collaboration & product mindset

Education

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

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Pulumi

Job description

We've partnered with a well-funded, fast-growing startup in the biotech space to help them find a Sr. DevOps Engineer. Their product helps pharma, biotech, and investors figure out whether a drug or biotech asset is worth acquiring, licensing, investing in, or developing. They're headquartered in Cambridge, MA with offices in SF and NYC, and looking for candidates who can come into one of the offices twice a week, while working remotely three days a week.

What You'll Do

• Infrastructure as Code:Design, build, and maintain our cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent) using infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) to keep environments reproducible, auditable, and scalable.
• CI/CD Pipelines:Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support fast, reliable, and safe deployments across the platform's frontend, backend, and ML orchestration services.
• Observability & Monitoring:Implement and maintain monitoring, logging, and alerting (Grafana) to give the team real-time visibility into system health and quickly surface issues before they impact customers.
• Reliability & Incident Response:Drive reliability engineering practices. Uptime targets, SLOs/SLAs, incident response processes, on-call rotations, and driving accountability for PIRs. Our clients demand high availability for time-sensitive deal and scientific data.
• Security & Compliance:Implement and enforce best practices for secure infrastructure, including network security, secrets management, access controls, and data protection.
• Cost & Performance Optimization:Monitor and optimize cloud spend and system performance, balancing cost efficiency with the reliability and scalability the platform requires. You should know an AWS bill like the back of your hand and be able to offer suggestions on how best to optimize it.
• Database & Data Infrastructure Support:Partner with engineering to manage and scale data infrastructure (e.g., Postgres, DynamoDB, Pipelines), including backups, disaster recovery, and performance tuning.
• Developer Experience:Build tooling and self-service workflows that make it easy for engineers to deploy, test, and debug their services, reducing friction across the development lifecycle.
• Collaboration & Product Thinking:Work cross-functionally with software and ML engineers, product leads, and domain experts to translate scaling and reliability needs into concrete infrastructure investments.

What you bring

• Education: Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Proven experience designing, deploying, and operating production infrastructure in the cloud (AWS), including networking, compute, storage, and IAM.
• Infrastructure as Code: Hands-on experience with IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar) to manage infrastructure in a repeatable, version-controlled way.
• CI/CD & Automation: Expertise building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and automating build, test, and deployment workflows. We are a github shop.
• Observability: Experience implementing monitoring, logging, and alerting systems, and using them to drive down MTTR/MTTD. Automated DORA metric tracking too.
• Database & Data Flow: Comfort working with both relational and NoSQL databases (e.g., Postgres, MongoDB, DynamoDB), including backup, replication, and performance considerations.
• Security & Compliance Awareness: Familiarity with best practices for secure infrastructure, secrets management, and compliance (especially valuable in healthcare, life sciences, or enterprise environments).
• Scripting & Automation: Proficiency in at least one scripting/programming language (e.g., Python, Bash, Go) for building automation and internal tooling.
• Collaboration & Product Mindset: Strong communication and collaboration skills; ability to work closely with software engineers, ML engineers, and product managers to deliver a reliable, scalable platform.

Soft Skills

• Strong problem-solving skills and an analytical mindset.
• Passion for continuous learning, rapid prototyping, and iterating based on system and user needs.
• Autonomous, self-starter attitude with a strong sense of ownership.
• Excellent communication skills. You should feel comfortable presenting on security architecture to a client's security team.
• Collaborative team player with a desire to build things that truly matter.

Bonus

• Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or biopharma sectors is nice, but not required. More important is a willingness to dive into the field and a curiosity to learn about life sciences and the drug development process, and how deal making revolves around it.