Senior Systems Operations Engineer

Role Overview

• Design, deploy, and manage scalable and highly available cloud infrastructure on AWS, with deep expertise in core services (EC2, EKS, S3, RDS, IAM, VPC, and beyond).
• Develop and maintain disaster recovery plans leveraging AWS capabilities for backup and replication to ensure business continuity.
• Collaborate with engineering and security teams to improve infrastructure health, security, and long-term scalability.
• Design reusable Terraform/OpenTofu modules following DRY principles and organizational standards; implement module versioning and lifecycle strategies.
• Direct the migration of manual infrastructure to code; establish patterns and best practices for IaC adoption across the team.
• Implement IaC testing strategies, including validation, linting, and integration testing, using tools such as Terraform-Compliance or Checkov.
• Architect and maintain complex Bitbucket pipeline configurations for multi-environment IaC deployments; implement pipeline security best practices.
• Implement AIOps practices, leveraging AI tools to enhance monitoring, incident response, and predictive alerting.
• Use AI-assisted development and operations tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude) to accelerate troubleshooting, code review, and documentation generation.
• Evaluate and implement AI-powered automation to reduce operational toil, improve repeatability, and scale platform capabilities.
• Define and implement SLOs for services; guide and/or participate in incident response and conduct blameless postmortems.
• Implement chaos engineering practices to proactively identify system weaknesses before they impact production.
• Build and maintain comprehensive monitoring solutions using tools such as CloudWatch and Datadog to track performance and drive optimization.
• Develop automation scripts and tools in Python, Bash, or similar languages to streamline operations and eliminate manual toil.
• Build self-service capabilities for development teams to reduce cognitive load and enable developer autonomy across the organization.
• Guide the solution architecture and end-to-end implementation of DistroKid’s first Internal Developer Portal (IDP).
• Define the IDP roadmap and success criteria in partnership with engineering leadership; establish golden paths, service catalogs, and self-service workflows that reduce deployment friction and accelerate developer productivity.
• Drive adoption of the IDP across engineering teams; gather feedback, iterate on the platform, and measure impact through developer experience metrics and reduced time-to-deploy.
• Guide cost optimization initiatives; implement rightsizing recommendations, reserved-capacity strategies, and tagging standards for cost allocation.
• Monitor and optimize AWS resource usage; select appropriate services and configurations to meet performance requirements cost-effectively.
• Direct planning, decision-making, and execution for infrastructure projects; own workstreams end-to-end.
• Partner cross-functionally with engineering, security, and product teams; communicate impact in terms of company strategy and OKRs.
• Provide technical mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers; invest in team growth and foster a culture of continuous learning.
• Maintain and contribute to infrastructure documentation, runbooks, and architectural decision records to ensure knowledge sharing and operational consistency.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of experience in systems operations, platform engineering, or DevOps with a focus on cloud infrastructure and containerized environments.
• Proven production experience with AWS services (EC2, EKS, S3, RDS, IAM, VPC, API Gateway, Event Bridge, etc) and Kubernetes.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools, specifically Terraform and/or OpenTofu, including module design, state management, remote backends, and IaC testing.
• Strong knowledge of Linux/Unix administration, systems, and shell scripting.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or similar programming languages.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure deployments (Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, or similar).
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, or Datadog).
• Demonstrated experience implementing or working with AIOps tools, practices, or AI-assisted operations in a professional context.
• Experience using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Warp, Claude, or similar) to accelerate engineering work.

Tech Stack

• AWS
• Cloud
• EC2
• Grafana
• Jenkins
• Kubernetes
• Linux
• Prometheus
• Python
• Shell Scripting
• Terraform
• Unix
• Go

Benefits

• Retirement plans (401k, SIPP, etc.)
• Health insurance
• Generous paid time off
• Parental leave
• Home office allowance
• Flexible work schedules
• Paid and discounted subscriptions
• Regular engagement activities