Senior DevOps Engineer

AHEAD · United States

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • $140,000 – $160,000
  • Posted 2026-10-27
  • Confirmed live on 29 October 2026

Apply at AHEAD

Job description

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.
 
At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD. 
 
We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived. 
 
We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD. 

Building in the Age of AI
AI has changed what great engineering looks like, and we’ve leaned in. We expect engineers to use AI tools and coding agents fluently to prototype, explore, and accelerate the routine, so that human time goes to what matters: designing resilient systems, exercising judgment, and verifying that what ships is correct and secure. That applies to operations as much as application code. We’re looking for someone who wields these tools with taste.

• Reach for AI to move faster on templates, scripts, runbooks, and research, then review every line like you own it, because you do.

• Spend your judgment where it counts: architecture, reliability, security, and cost.

• Help push the practice forward with better tooling, prompts, and workflows that make the whole team more effective.

What Will You Be Doing?
• 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.

What Does the Ideal Candidate Look Like?
• 5+ years in DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering, with deep hands-on AWS experience.

• Strong infrastructure-as-code skills. We use CloudFormation; experience with Terraform or similar translates fine.

• A track record of building and running CI/CD pipelines for real production systems. GitLab CI experience is a plus.

• Experience with observability tooling, ideally Datadog: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and knowing which signals matter.

• Solid grounding in cloud security: IAM, encryption, network design, and least-privilege thinking. Experience supporting SOC2 or similar compliance programs is a plus.

• Experience running containerized workloads with Docker and Amazon ECS on Fargate. Kubernetes experience is a plus.

• Hands-on experience operating relational databases in production, ideally SQL Server and PostgreSQL on AWS.

• A methodical approach to troubleshooting live production problems. Experience debugging Elixir/BEAM or JVM services is a plus.

• 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. You’re comfortable sharing on-call, stay calm in incidents, communicate clearly, and follow through on root causes.

• 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.

Why You’ll Love It Here
• Join a team where innovation and curiosity are the norm.

• We invest seriously in modern tooling, including the best AI tools, and we’re always looking for the next approach that makes the team better.

• Competitive salary, benefits, and an environment where work-life balance is more than just a catchphrase.

• Your work will be felt daily by every engineer on the team and every enterprise that relies on our platforms.

Make Your Voice Heard
AHEAD recognizes the value of diverse perspectives. In our ever-evolving te

Prepare for the interview

Nothing collected for this employer yet. The Blind 75 is what technical screens draw from; practise it here, with a coach, in Java or Python.

More at AHEAD

All open software jobs