Hiring DevOps Engineers: The Complete Guide

# DevOps Engineer

**Location:** Austin, TX (Hybrid - 2 days/week in office) · **Employment Type:** Full-time · **Level:** Senior

## About [Company]

[Company] is a developer tools platform helping engineering teams ship faster with intelligent CI/CD and deployment automation.

We serve over 800 companies—from Series A startups to public enterprises—processing 2.3 million deployments per month. Our platform reduces deployment time by 60% on average while maintaining 99.95% uptime.

**Why join [Company]?**

- Work on infrastructure at real scale: 50+ microservices, 12M daily API requests
- Join a 180-person team with a dedicated 8-person Platform Engineering group
- Series C funded ($85M from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures)
- Strong infrastructure culture: IaC everywhere, no ClickOps, blameless postmortems

## The Role

We're hiring a Senior DevOps Engineer to join our Platform team. You'll own critical infrastructure powering thousands of customer deployments daily—from our multi-region Kubernetes clusters to our CI/CD pipelines.

This isn't a firefighting role. We've invested heavily in automation and observability, and we need someone to push our infrastructure to the next level: improving deployment velocity, reducing cloud costs, and building the internal developer platform our engineering teams depend on.

**The scale you'll work with:**

- 50+ microservices across 3 AWS regions
- 400+ Kubernetes pods serving 12M requests/day
- 150+ deployments per day across all services
- $180K/month AWS spend (and growing)
- 99.95% uptime SLA

## Objectives of This Role

- Reduce deployment pipeline time from 18 minutes to under 8 minutes within 6 months
- Implement cost optimization initiatives targeting 20% reduction in cloud spend
- Build self-service infrastructure tooling that reduces DevOps tickets by 50%
- Lead the migration of legacy services to our Kubernetes platform
- Establish SLOs and error budgets for all Tier 1 services

## Responsibilities

- Design and manage AWS infrastructure using Terraform (currently 200+ modules)
- Operate and optimize our EKS clusters across 3 regions (us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1)
- Build and improve CI/CD pipelines in GitHub Actions enabling 150+ daily deployments
- Implement GitOps workflows with ArgoCD for declarative deployments
- Design monitoring, alerting, and dashboards using Datadog and PagerDuty
- Create self-service tools so developers can provision resources without DevOps involvement
- Lead incident response during on-call rotation and conduct blameless postmortems
- Mentor engineers on infrastructure best practices and cloud-native development
- Collaborate with Security on compliance (SOC 2 Type II, GDPR)

## Required Skills and Qualifications

- 5+ years of DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering experience
- Strong expertise with AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC, CloudFront)
- Production experience with Terraform: module design, state management, workspace patterns
- Hands-on Kubernetes experience: deploying, scaling, debugging, writing Helm charts
- Proficiency in at least one programming language (Go, Python, or Bash)
- Experience designing and optimizing CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins)
- Familiarity with observability tools: metrics, logging, tracing
- Comfortable with on-call responsibilities (we compensate fairly—see below)

## Preferred Skills and Qualifications

- Experience with GitOps tools (ArgoCD, Flux)
- Background in multi-region or multi-cloud architectures
- Familiarity with service mesh (Istio, Linkerd)
- Experience with cloud cost optimization at scale
- SOC 2 or HIPAA compliance experience
- AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer) plus production experience

## Tech Stack

- **Cloud Platform:** AWS (EKS, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, CloudFront, Lambda)
- **Infrastructure as Code:** Terraform with Atlantis for PR automation
- **Container Orchestration:** Kubernetes (EKS) with Helm and Kustomize
- **CI/CD:** GitHub Actions with self-hosted runners
- **GitOps:** ArgoCD for continuous deployment
- **Monitoring:** Datadog (APM, logs, infrastructure), PagerDuty
- **Logging:** Datadog Logs, AWS CloudWatch
- **Secrets Management:** AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault
- **Service Mesh:** Evaluating Istio (not yet in production)
- **Security:** Snyk, AWS Security Hub, Falco

## On-Call Expectations

We believe in complete transparency about on-call. Here's exactly what to expect:

**Rotation Details:**

- On-call rotation every 6 weeks
- 1 week per rotation (Monday 9 AM to Monday 9 AM)
- 8 engineers in the rotation (DevOps + senior backend engineers share the load)
- Secondary on-call available for escalation

**Compensation:**

- $500/week additional for primary on-call
- $200/incident for incidents requiring 30+ minutes of work outside business hours
- Comp day after any week with 3+ incidents or significant night disruption

**Incident Reality:**

- Average 2-3 pages per week (most during business hours)
- Night pages: ~1 per month on average
- Most common incidents: deployment rollbacks, database connection spikes, third-party API failures
- Escalation path: Primary → Secondary → Engineering Manager → VP Engineering

**Support Structure:**

- 85% of incidents have documented runbooks
- Auto-remediation handles ~40% of alerts before paging
- Blameless postmortems for every Severity 1-2 incident

## Compensation and Benefits

**Salary:** $165,000 - $195,000 (based on experience and location)

**On-Call Compensation:** $500/week additional during on-call rotation (approximately $4,300/year)

**Equity:** 0.03% - 0.08% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff, early exercise available)

**Benefits:**

- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% covered for employees, 75% for dependents)
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- $3,000 annual learning budget (conferences, courses, certifications)
- $1,500 home office setup allowance
- 401(k) with 4% company match (immediate vesting)
- 16 weeks paid parental leave
- AWS/GCP certification costs fully reimbursed

**Location:** Austin HQ with hybrid flexibility (2 days/week in office). Remote considered for exceptional candidates in US time zones.

## Interview Process

Our interview process typically takes 2-3 weeks. We're transparent about on-call from the start.

- **Step 1: Recruiter Screen** (30 min) - We'll discuss your background, interests, and on-call expectations upfront.

- **Step 2: Technical Screen** (60 min) - Infrastructure fundamentals, Terraform/K8s concepts, and your past projects.

- **Step 3: Infrastructure Design** (60 min) - Design a multi-region deployment system. Collaborative, not adversarial.

- **Step 4: Troubleshooting Exercise** (45 min) - Debug a realistic production scenario together.

- **Step 5: Team & Culture** (45 min) - Meet 2 team members and discuss working style.

- **Step 6: Hiring Manager** (30 min) - Career goals, offer details, and final questions.

You'll receive feedback within 3 business days of each round.

## How to Apply

Submit your resume and optionally include links to GitHub, blog posts, or infrastructure projects you're proud of. We review every application and respond within 5 business days.

If you have questions about our infrastructure, on-call expectations, or the role before applying, reach out—we're happy to chat.

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*[Company] is an equal opportunity employer. We're committed to building a diverse team and inclusive culture. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.*

*We believe diverse teams build better infrastructure. If you're excited about this role but don't meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply. If you need accommodations during the interview process, let us know and we'll make it work.*