DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer A growing, technology-driven financial services company in the automotive industry is seeking a DevOps Engineer to become its first dedicated DevOps hire. The company provides critical payments and financial infrastructure supporting the automotive lending ecosystem and is entering an accelerated growth phase following a successful Series A funding round. This is an opportunity to join a small, highly collaborative engineering organization where the DevOps function is currently distributed across the engineering team and will now be consolidated under one technical owner. The company offers a highly autonomous, data-driven culture with minimal micromanagement, strong leadership access, and significant opportunity to shape the infrastructure, security, observability, and compliance practices as the organization scales. This is a fully remote, full-time position offering a salary of approximately $115,000–$185,000, depending on experience and location, along with a company-wide quarterly bonus program and comprehensive benefits. About the Role The DevOps Engineer will work closely with the CTO, engineering team, and Chief Compliance Officer to establish scalable infrastructure and security practices while remaining hands-on with a broad range of technical initiatives. Responsibilities Serve as the primary owner of DevOps, infrastructure, platform engineering, and related operational standards.Restructure repositories and deployment processes to properly isolate sensitive systems and services.Consolidate database migrations into a unified, service-oriented repository structure.Implement database read replicas and support application teams in separating read and write workloads.Migrate messaging infrastructure to JetStream and improve queue/streaming capabilities.Build and maintain secure access to internal resources using VPN, zero-trust, Tailscale, or similar technologies.Partner directly with compliance leadership on information security, access controls, audit logging, secrets management, and SOC 2 initiatives.Strengthen observability through CloudWatch, Datadog, error tracing, logging, and monitoring improvements.Develop analytics and visibility pipelines using application and infrastructure logs.Create dashboards providing ongoing visibility into application resources, including CPU, memory, and infrastructure utilization.Establish proactive infrastructure practices around capacity planning, cost management, incident readiness, and reliability.Provide day-to-day technical support to the engineering organization while maintaining focused time for larger infrastructure initiatives.Identify infrastructure and security improvements and independently develop solutions rather than relying on predetermined processes.Help establish the standards, architecture, tooling, and operational practices that will support the company's continued growth. Qualifications The ideal candidate is an autonomous DevOps, SRE, Platform, or Infrastructure Engineer who is comfortable operating as the technical owner of a broad infrastructure environment and building processes from the ground up. The strongest candidates will bring: Required Skills 4+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or a closely related role.Strong hands-on AWS experience, including CloudWatch, networking, IAM, and core infrastructure services.Experience with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform, Pulumi, or a comparable platform.Hands-on experience with Datadog or another enterprise observability/monitoring platform.Strong understanding of relational databases, including migrations, replication, and read/write splitting.Experience with message queues or streaming technologies such as NATS/JetStream, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar.Experience implementing secure network access using VPN, Tailscale, zero-trust solutions, or comparable technologies.Ability to work cross-functionally with engineering, compliance, and executive leadership.Strong problem-solving and communication skills with the ability to independently identify issues and propose solutions.Comfort working in a startup or growth-stage environment where requirements can evolve and priorities may shift. Preferred Skills Experience in fintech, payments, financial services, or another regulated environment is preferred but not required.Familiarity with SOC 2 or similar compliance frameworks is a plus.Previous experience as the first or only DevOps/infrastructure hire is highly desirable.Bachelor's degree preferred but not required.AWS certifications are a plus but not required.