Senior DevOps Engineer

AHEAD is hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer to build and operate the AWS cloud foundation behind its Hatch and Unity platforms and application portfolio. The role shares ownership of infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, security, reliability, incident response, and platform support in collaboration with software engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve our AWS environments, managed as infrastructure as code with CloudFormation
• Build and maintain GitLab CI/CD pipelines that take code from commit to production quickly and safely
• Build out observability in Datadog: monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and the signals that tell us how the platforms are really behaving
• Strengthen our security posture: IAM, least privilege, encryption, network boundaries, and the controls that support our SOC2 program
• Automate the routine away, from environment provisioning to deployments to operational chores
• Share the on-call rotation with the team, lead incident response and postmortems, and drive the fixes that keep problems from repeating
• Troubleshoot live production issues across the stack, from container memory and runtime behavior to database load and network paths
• Support our databases on Amazon RDS (SQL Server) and Aurora PostgreSQL: performance, capacity, backups, and upgrades
• Keep an eye on cost and performance, and tune both as the platforms grow
• Work side by side with software engineers to make the platform easy to build on, and mentor the team on operational excellence

Requirements:

• 5+ years in DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering, with deep hands-on AWS experience
• Strong infrastructure-as-code skills
• A track record of building and running CI/CD pipelines for real production systems
• Experience with observability tooling: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and knowing which signals matter
• Solid grounding in cloud security: IAM, encryption, network design, and least-privilege thinking
• Experience running containerized workloads with Docker and Amazon ECS on Fargate
• Hands-on experience operating relational databases in production
• A methodical approach to troubleshooting live production problems
• Comfortable in at least one scripting language, and fluent with modern AI development tools, paired with the discipline to verify everything you ship
• Strong judgment under pressure
• Clear, direct communication with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• A drive to keep learning and to help shape how the team builds and operates
• GitLab CI experience is a plus
• ideally Datadog
• Experience supporting SOC2 or similar compliance programs is a plus
• Kubernetes experience is a plus
• ideally SQL Server and PostgreSQL on AWS
• Experience debugging Elixir/BEAM or JVM services is a plus