Principal DevOps Engineer, AppZen

• 10+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, infrastructure, or platform engineering, with at least 3 years operating at a Staff or Principal level (or equivalent technical leadership scope)
• Deep, hands-on AWS expertise across compute, networking, IAM, data, and observability services; demonstrated ownership of multi-account, multi-region SaaS architectures
• Strong production experience with Kubernetes (preferably EKS), including upgrades, autoscaling, and securing multi-tenant clusters
• Demonstrated hands-on operations experience with PostgreSQL at scale — query and index tuning, replication, HA/failover, backups, and version upgrades — and with Elasticsearch / OpenSearch (cluster sizing, shard strategy, ingest tuning, and incident response)
• Working knowledge of additional datastores commonly used in SaaS: Redis, Kafka or other message brokers, and object storage; comfortable evaluating trade-offs between managed services (RDS, Aurora, ElastiCache, MSK, OpenSearch Service) and self-managed options
• Expert with Terraform and modern IaC patterns; clear opinions on module design, state management, and PR-driven workflows
• Strong scripting and automation skills in at least one of Python, Go, or Bash; comfortable contributing real code, not just reviewing
• Track record of designing and operating CI/CD pipelines at scale (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD, or similar)
• Experience running production workloads under SOC 2 or comparable compliance frameworks; comfortable partnering with Security on audits and remediation
• Demonstrated technical leadership without formal authority: writing decision-grade design docs, mentoring engineers, and influencing across teams. You enjoy lifting others through your work

Desirable

• As Principal DevOps Engineer you are the most senior individual contributor on the team. You set the technical direction, own the hardest infrastructure and reliability problems end-to-end, and lift the entire org through architecture, code, design reviews, and mentorship
• You partner closely with the DevOps Manager and engineering leadership on roadmap and standards, but your scorecard is technical outcomes — not headcount
• Expect roughly 70-80% deep hands-on engineering (Terraform, Kubernetes, Postgres, Elasticsearch, pipelines, incident command) and 20-30% technical leadership: design reviews, mentorship, cross-team alignment, and writing the standards others build against
• Set technical direction:
• Own the architecture for AppZen's cloud platform: AWS topology, Kubernetes design, datastore strategy, CI/CD, and observability — make the long-horizon calls and write the design docs the rest of engineering builds against
• Lead deep design reviews; set bar-raising standards for reliability, security, performance, and cost across infrastructure code and production systems
• Identify the highest-leverage platform investments (toil reduction, reliability, developer velocity) and drive them from idea to rollout
• Run Reliable, Secure Cloud Infrastructure:
• Drive AWS architecture and operations across multiple regions and accounts; own multi-account landing-zone, IAM, and network patterns
• Set the Terraform module and IaC patterns the team uses; lead the hardest migrations and cleanups personally
• Partner with Security on SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and customer audit requirements; design controls for IAM, network, and secrets management
• Drive cloud cost engineering: visibility, forecasting, and optimization (Savings Plans, rightsizing, multi-tenant efficiency)
• Operate and Scale Critical Production Datastores:
• Be the team's go-to expert on PostgreSQL in production: schema and index strategy, query tuning, vacuum/bloat, replication, failover, point-in-time recovery, and major-version upgrades on RDS / Aurora
• Own scaling and reliability of Elasticsearch / OpenSearch: shard and index design, JVM/heap tuning, snapshot strategy, hot-warm tiers, and incident response under heavy ingest or query load
• Set patterns for supporting datastores: Redis (caching, queues), Kafka or SQS/SNS (streaming and async), and S3-backed data lakes — including HA, durability, and disaster recovery
• Lead capacity planning, performance benchmarking, data-tier cost optimization, backup/restore drills, and customer data isolation for multi-tenant workloads
• Evolve the Kubernetes and Container Platform:
• Own the architecture of our EKS-based Kubernetes platform: cluster lifecycle, autoscaling, multi-tenancy, and workload isolation
• Define the golden paths service teams use — Helm, Kustomize, and GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD or Flux — and personally build the trickiest pieces
• Set patterns for service mesh, ingress, and zero-downtime deployments
• Own CI/CD and the Developer Platform:
• Architect internal developer platform capabilities so product teams ship safely and quickly without infra friction
• Drive the design of build, test, and deploy pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD); enforce supply-chain security and artifact provenance
• Set the bar for DORA metrics: lead time, deploy frequency, change failure rate, and MTTR — and own the highest-impact improvements
• Drive observability and SRE practice:
• Architect the observability stack (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry); define metrics, logs, and tracing standards across services
• Define and operationalize SLOs and error budgets in partnership with service owners
• Act as incident commander for high-severity events; lead blameless post-mortems and convert learnings into durable systemic fixes
• Multiply the Team:
• Mentor senior and staff engineers; raise the bar through code and design reviews, pairing, and writing the references docs and run books others learn from
• Represent Cloud Engineering in cross-team forums; influence Product Engineering, Security, and Data on architecture and reliability decisions without authority
• Help the DevOps Manager hire — calibrate technical bar, design interview loops, and close senior candidates