Junior DevOps Engineer - AI startup

About Founding Teams

Founding Teams is an AI pre accelerator and talent platform. We help Founders hire engineers, designers and marketing talent for their AI startup.

About the Role

As our Lead DevOps Engineer, you’ll design, implement, and maintain scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines. You’ll mentor a team of DevOps engineers, partner closely with development teams, and drive best practices around automation, monitoring, and incident response.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Architecture:
• Lead design of cloud-native (AWS/Azure/GCP) microservices and data-platform architectures.
• Define Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) standards using tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.
• CI/CD & Automation:
• Build and optimize end-to-end pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions).
• Automate testing, packaging, and deployments for containerized applications (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Monitoring & Observability:
• Implement logging, metrics, tracing (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Datadog, New Relic).
• Establish SLOs/SLIs, alerting, and runbooks for on-call rotations.
• Security & Compliance:
• Integrate security scanning (SAST/DAST) into pipelines (e.g. SonarQube, Snyk).
• Enforce IAM best practices, secrets management (Vault, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault).
• Performance & Cost Optimization:
• Right-size cloud resources, optimize autoscaling, and manage reserved instances.
• Conduct regular architecture reviews to identify bottlenecks.
• Leadership & Mentorship:
• Coach and grow a team of DevOps/SRE engineers.
• Drive cross-functional training on DevOps tooling and practices.
• Incident Management:
• Lead post-mortem analyses and continuous improvement of incident response processes.

Required Skills & Experience

• 5+ years in DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering roles
• Cloud Expertise: Deep hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• IaC & Configuration Management:
• Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Pulumi
• Ansible, Chef, or Puppet
• CI/CD: Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI
• Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS)
• Monitoring & Logging: Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic, or equivalent
• Scripting & Automation: Python, Go, Bash, or similar
• Security Tools: Familiarity with Vault, AWS IAM, security scanners (Snyk, Trivy)
• Networking Fundamentals: VPCs, load balancers, DNS, CDN, firewalls
• Soft Skills:
• Strong communication and collaboration across teams
• Proven leadership: mentoring, code reviews, and guiding best practices

Nice-to-Haves

• Database Operations: Experience with managed databases (RDS, Cloud SQL, Cosmos DB) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, MongoDB)
• Serverless & Edge: Lambda/FaaS, CloudFront, Akamai, or Fastly
• Observability Platforms: OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Splunk
• Cost-Management: AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management
• Certifications: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or equivalent