Senior DevOps Engineer (9+ yrs)

Senior DevOps Engineer – Production Stability

Experience: 9+ Years

Employment Type: Contract-to-Hire (C2H)

Location: Remote

Job Overview

We are looking for a highly experienced Senior DevOps Engineer with a strong production-operations mindset to support and stabilize business-critical 24x7 systems. The role involves working across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments, legacy and modern technologies, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, networking, API gateways, and observability platforms.

This is a highly hands-on role (90% individual contributor) requiring strong troubleshooting and incident-response capabilities. The selected candidate will work as part of a 3–4 member contractor engineering pod and participate in an on-call rotation, primarily on weekdays.

Key Responsibilities

Production Operations & Incident Management

• Support and maintain 24x7 production systems and integrations.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and respond to production incidents.
• Troubleshoot issues across CI/CD, Kubernetes, applications, networking, and API gateways.
• Perform incident triage, mitigation, recovery, and root-cause analysis.
• Ensure reliable deployments, rollback procedures, and production stability.

CI/CD & Deployment

• Manage and troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Octopus, or similar tools.
• Diagnose and resolve pipeline and deployment failures.
• Support deployments across DEV, QA, PROD, and special environments.
• Improve deployment reliability, automation, and consistency.

Kubernetes & Infrastructure

• Operate and troubleshoot Kubernetes clusters across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Perform cluster troubleshooting, patching, and basic upgrades.
• Monitor and optimize CPU, memory, and other infrastructure resources.
• Troubleshoot supporting services such as Redis, RabbitMQ, databases, and API gateways.

Cloud, API Gateway & Legacy Systems

• Support AWS API Gateway and related cloud infrastructure.
• Work with existing Terraform modules and configurations.
• Troubleshoot routing, domain, and traffic-related issues involving Cloudflare/APIM.
• Support critical legacy systems, including Windows-based services.

Monitoring & Observability

• Use Prometheus, Grafana, logs, and monitoring platforms for production troubleshooting.
• Analyze system performance and identify potential reliability issues.
• Improve alerts, dashboards, and monitoring where required.

Documentation & Knowledge Sharing

• Create and maintain deployment, rollback, recovery, and troubleshooting documentation.
• Develop and maintain operational runbooks for critical systems.
• Share technical knowledge with the contractor lead and engineering team.

Mandatory Skills

• Strong hands-on Linux experience – Mandatory
• 9+ years of experience in DevOps / SRE / Production Operations
• Strong production troubleshooting and incident-management experience
• Hands-on Kubernetes operations
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or Octopus
• Experience with AWS and/or Azure
• Working knowledge of Terraform
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, and centralized logging
• Experience supporting hybrid cloud + on-premises environments
• Strong scripting skills using Bash, Python, PowerShell, or similar

Preferred Experience

• AWS API Gateway / Azure API Management
• Cloudflare and networking
• Redis and RabbitMQ
• Database troubleshooting
• Windows-based legacy systems
• Production on-call and 24x7 support environments
• Incident response, RCA, and operational runbooks

What We're Looking For

• Strong operator/SRE mindset
• Comfortable working in complex and partially documented environments
• Ability to quickly understand existing systems and take ownership
• Calm and effective under production pressure
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
• Focused on stability, reliability, and business continuity
• Comfortable with hands-on production ownership and on-call responsibilities

First 90-Day Success Criteria

• Independently support critical production systems.
• Stabilize and improve CI/CD pipeline reliability.
• Handle production incidents efficiently and minimize downtime.
• Document critical deployment, rollback, and recovery workflows.
• Establish effective collaboration with the contractor lead and engineering team.

Not a Good Fit If You

• Prefer only greenfield or highly standardized environments.
• Focus primarily on architecture rather than hands-on operations.
• Prefer to avoid production ownership or on-call responsibilities.
• Require fully documented systems before taking ownership.
• Are uncomfortable troubleshooting under time-sensitive production conditions.