About the Role
We are looking for a senior DevOps & Security Consultant to design, secure, and operate a highly available, scalable, and cost-optimized AWS platform, with a strong focus on Kubernetes (EKS) and container-based infrastructure.
This role is responsible for improving reliability, security, disaster recovery readiness, and operational maturity, while also guiding and mentoring junior DevOps engineers. You’ll play a key role in our migration toward a scalable, Docker/Kubernetes-based architecture and in strengthening our production reliability and security posture.
Key Responsibilities
1. Platform Architecture, Scalability & Reliability
- Design and operate highly available, scalable AWS infrastructure using Kubernetes/EKS and containerized workloads.
- Lead the migration and evolution toward a Docker/Kubernetes-based platform.
- Define and improve SLA, SLO, and SLI targets and ensure systems meet uptime and performance goals.
- Architect and continuously improve backup, disaster recovery, and failover strategies.
2. Security, Hardening & Traffic Protection
- Harden and secure Ubuntu/Linux systems (patching, access controls, audit logging, SSH hardening, CIS-style baselines).
- Design and manage network security: VPC architecture, security groups, NACLs, private networking, and host-level firewalls (UFW/iptables).
- Implement and optimize traffic protection and WAF (e.g., AWS WAF / Cloudflare) to mitigate bots, abuse, and OWASP Top 10 risks while minimizing false positives.
- Enforce best practices around IAM, secrets management, encryption in transit/at rest, and least-privilege access.
- Lead security reviews, incident response processes, and post-incident improvement.
3. DevOps, CI/CD & Operations
- Own and improve CI/CD pipelines for containerized and Kubernetes-based deployments.
- Standardize and govern Infrastructure as Code (Terraform / CloudFormation / CDK).
- Improve operational excellence through better processes, documentation, and automation of workflows (not scripting-heavy, but platform/process-driven).
- Create and maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and incident response templates.
- Drive consistent, safe, and repeatable production deployments.
4. Observability & Production Readiness
- Use observability data to drive performance, reliability, and capacity improvements.
- Own and evolve observability using New Relic (APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, dashboards, alerts).
- Define and improve alerting, on-call readiness, and incident response workflows.
6. Cost Optimization & Efficiency
- Continuously analyze and optimize AWS and EKS costs.
- Implement budgets, alerts, and cost governance.
- Drive right-sizing, autoscaling, and efficient resource utilization across clusters and services.
7. Mentorship & Team Enablement
- Mentor and guide junior DevOps / platform engineers.
- Review architecture, infrastructure changes, and security designs.
- Establish standards, best practices, and documentation for cloud, Kubernetes, and security.
- Raise the team’s bar on reliability, security, and operational maturity.
8. What We’re Looking For
- 7+ years in DevOps / Platform / SRE / Cloud / Infrastructure roles.
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS and Kubernetes/EKS in production environments.
- Solid experience with Docker-based platforms and container orchestration.
- Strong background in Linux/Ubuntu operations and hardening.
- Experience designing and operating secure network architectures and firewalls.
- Hands-on experience with WAF and traffic protection (AWS WAF, Cloudflare, or similar).
- Proven experience with high availability, disaster recovery, backups, and RPO/RTO planning.
- Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD systems.
- Experience using New Relic (or similar) for observability, alerting, and performance monitoring.
- Strong troubleshooting and production-operations mindset.
- Experience mentoring junior engineers and improving team practices.
- Comfortable working at the architecture, process, and platform level (not a scripting-heavy role).
9. Nice to Have
- Experience in SaaS and/or regulated environments (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, etc.).
- Experience with EKS autoscaling, cluster upgrades, and multi-environment setups.
- Experience with DDoS protection, bot mitigation, and traffic shaping.
- Experience defining SRE-style reliability practices (SLOs, error budgets, incident reviews).
10. What Success Looks Like
- A stable, secure, and scalable Kubernetes/EKS platform running production workloads.
- Measurable improvements in uptime, incident response, and recovery times (RPO/RTO).
- Strong security posture across AWS, Kubernetes, and Ubuntu systems.
- Clear visibility into system health via New Relic dashboards and alerts.
- More predictable and optimized cloud costs.
- A stronger, more confident DevOps team operating with clear standards and playbooks.
