DevOps Engineer

About Kaitongo

Kaitongo is a Canadian GPT-powered Market Intelligence startup helping client-facing professionals stay ahead with relevant market insights and credible, personalized engagement. Our platform blends domain data, advanced AI, and engineering to deliver intelligence that drives business relationships.

We're now looking for a DevOps Engineer to take full ownership of our infrastructure — scaling and securing the systems that power our AI and data-driven products.

Role Overview

As a DevOps Engineer, you'll lead the design, automation, and monitoring of Kaitongo's hybrid infrastructure across Hetzner bare-metal (RKE2/Kubernetes) and AWS.

You'll manage Kubernetes clusters, Docker-based workloads (build, harden, publish), AWS serverless (10+ Lambdas), CI/CD (Bitbucket Pipelines), and critical data infra (PostgreSQL + PgBouncer, OpenSearch, Weaviate, Redis) with a strong focus on security and cost efficiency.

You'll work closely with backend, data, and AI engineers to ensure deployments are fast, stable, and secure.

This is a hands-on role with high autonomy and a chance to shape DevOps practices from the ground up.

Key Responsibilities

Infrastructure Management

• Own RKE2 Kubernetes on Hetzner, including Docker runtime, Helm/YAML, Longhorn storage, ingress, and RBAC.
• Manage core services: Django/React apps, PgBouncer, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Weaviate, Redis.
• Implement Infra-as-Code with Helm and CloudFormation (Terraform welcome).
• Administer Harbor (private Docker registry): image scanning, retention policies, access control.

CI/CD & Automation

• Evolve Bitbucket Pipelines for automated builds, tests, and deployments.
• Build, harden, and publish Docker images for backend, frontend, and infra components; implement multi-arch where needed.
• Implement canary/blue-green strategies, version tagging, and safe rollbacks.

Containerization & Orchestration

• Operate and optimize Docker + Kubernetes workloads (resource requests/limits, autoscaling, HPA).
• Enforce best practices for Docker image security (minimal bases, SBOMs, scanning), service isolation, secrets management, and multi-env promotion (dev/stage/prod).

Monitoring, Security & Reliability

• Ship observability with Prometheus/Grafana, centralized logs (OpenSearch), and actionable alerting.
• Manage TLS/Let's Encrypt (wildcard), network policies, IAM/RBAC, and routine security audits.
• Cost monitoring and optimization across AWS (Lambda/S3/SQS) and K8s resources.
• Implement reliable backups/DR for PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Weaviate (S3 & Longhorn).

Collaboration & Leadership

• Partner with Data/AI teams on RAG pipelines and embeddings; support backend releases and performance tuning.
• Champion documentation, runbooks, automation-first mindset, and observability standards.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in DevOps/SRE/Cloud Infrastructure.
• Strong Kubernetes (RKE2/EKS) and Docker experience; solid Linux/Bash.
• AWS (Lambda, S3, SQS, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch) proficiency.
• PostgreSQL admin & performance tuning; PgBouncer familiarity.
• CI/CD with Bitbucket Pipelines (or GitHub/Jenkins/GitLab).
• IaC with Helm and CloudFormation (Terraform a plus).
• Web stack: Nginx, SSL/TLS.
• Bonus: OpenSearch, Weaviate/vector DBs, Harbor, Hetzner, Celery/Django, legacy Puppet.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline.

Why Join Kaitongo

• Build the backbone of an AI-first market intelligence platform.
• Own infrastructure strategy and shape DevOps culture from day one.
• Work alongside senior AI and data engineers solving real-world challenges.
• Competitive salary + growth opportunities in a fast-moving GenAI environment.