Lead DevOps Engineer (AWS, Pulumi, Kubernetes) (Direct-Hire | 100% Remote) Applicants must be U.S. citizens or Green Card holders - NO C2C or Sponsorship

Overview

Optomi, in partnership with a fast-growing pet-property technology SaaS company, is Lead/ Sr. DevOps Engineer to help lead the technical direction of our AWS and Kubernetes environments. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for someone who wants to grow beyond individual contribution: you'll set technical standards and help shape how we plan and execute infrastructure initiatives. The team works across cloud infrastructure, security, developer tools, and automation. It builds tools that help engineers work with infrastructure, including a TypeScript-based interface for defining infrastructure and MCPs that let developers interact with automation. This role combines operating and improving AWS and Kubernetes environments with building the systems and tools that make infrastructure easier to use. This role is a strong fit for someone who already operates like a technical lead, someone engineers go to for guidance, who can break down ambiguous problems into clear plans, and who cares about doing things the right way as the team scales. Responsibilities: Technical Leadership: Act as a technical lead for infrastructure initiatives, translating roadmap priorities into concrete plans, sequencing work, and making architectural trade-off calls with the manager. Cloud Architecture: Design, build, and maintain scalable, resilient infrastructure across our AWS ecosystem, including compute, networking, and Kubernetes (EKS) clusters. Infrastructure as Code : Drive IaC standards and best practices across provisioning and deployment workflows, using Pulumi and TypeScript, with some legacy Terraform. Apply GitOps practices and contribute to developer-facing infrastructure tools. Developer Tooling and Automation: Build and improve tools that help developers provision and interact with infrastructure, including StackOps and MCP-based automation. CI/CD & Reliability: Own improvements to CI/CD pipelines using Dagger (experience with Dagger is helpful, but not required), deployment tooling, and release processes; lead capacity planning and performance/cost optimization efforts. Observability & Incident Response: Strengthen Datadog monitoring, alerting, dashboards, on-call practices, and operational workflows; lead or co-lead technical incident response and post-incident reviews. Cross-Functional Partnership: Work across Infrastructure, DevOps, and Security, partnering closely with Security and Product/Engineering to keep environments hardened, compliant, and unblocked for delivery. Process & Standards: Define and document infrastructure standards and runbooks to support efficient team growth. Project Ownership: Own infrastructure projects from scoping through rollout with minimal day-to-day oversight. Qualifications: 5+ years in DevOps, infrastructure, platform, or SRE engineering, including experience leading technical work and helping other engineers succeed as a formal lead or senior individual contributor. AWS Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience with core AWS services (EC2, VPC, IAM, RDS, S3, Lambda, etc.) and designing for scale and resilience. Kubernetes: Solid experience operating and troubleshooting Kubernetes (EKS) in production, including deployments, networking, and scaling. Infrastructure as Code: Extensive TypeScript experience, including building infrastructure tooling, and strong IaC skills with hands-on Pulumi experience or strong Terraform experience with exposure to Pulumi. GitOps & CI/CD: Experience with GitOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment automation. Dagger experience is a plus. Observability: Experience with Datadog (preferred) or a similar platform, including reviewing and improving monitoring and alerting. Communication: Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and influence technical decisions without formal authority. Ownership: Track record of taking ambiguous problems and driving them to clear, well-communicated outcomes.

Nice to Have

Qualifications: Security-focused infrastructure experience, such as IAM hardening, container or image scanning, or SOC 2 compliance in a regulated or compliance-driven SaaS environment. Previous experience as a team lead, staff engineer, or engineering manager. Familiarity with Datadog or a similar observability platform. Experience with Dagger or other CI/CD pipeline tooling. Python experience. Experience building internal developer platforms, infrastructure tools, or automation, including MCP-based tools. Experience with ECS or legacy Terraform-managed infrastructure.