Remote DevOps / Cloud Engineer

We're hiring a DevOps / Cloud Engineer to own how we build, deploy, and run production — CI/CD, cloud, observability — not product features and not the web UI.

Summary

• Flexible Title: Can tailor to reflect your skills & experience.
• Flexible Time: Can do full-time, part-time, side-gig (off-hours), or fractional (contract).
• Flexible Commitment: Can do short-term, long-term, or intermittent.
• Infra is the job. If you want to ship product tickets in React or own application features, our software-developer postings are the ones to apply to — not this one.

Why so flexible? We're a FUNDED startup racing to launch end of Q3 2026. That gives us just 3 months to stack features while raising additional working capital. Feel free to jump in, help us ship, then bounce >> or stick around. A successful launch translates into lots of permanent jobs for those that want them. We're also interested in long-term "side gig" relationships, if that's what you're into—in our experience, a few expert hours often beat full-time learning-curve hours.

About Us

We're a credible, funded, remote-first startup backed by a growing team. We're pre-launch and moving fast.

About The Role

This is the infra seat our product-engineering postings point away from. You will not be picking up feature tickets, owning the frontend, or being "the full-stack person who also knows AWS."

We need someone who has already run cloud in production: pipelines that ship safely, environments that don't rot, IAM that isn't a mess, and the ability to tell why it's down before the rest of the team guesses. You'll own CI/CD, our cloud account(s), deploys, monitoring, and the boring reliability work that makes launch possible.

This is ideal for someone with 3–6+ years in DevOps, SRE, or cloud engineering who wants to own the platform at a small startup without becoming an application developer.

You'll answer: Can we deploy on Friday without fear? Do we know when production is sick? What's the smallest amount of infra that gets us to launch without a pile of tickets later?

Compensation

Up to $150,000 max total annual compensation in Tier 1 cities; cash and equity components to be negotiated. Given the flexible commitment model, comp will be structured accordingly — fractional or hourly arrangements welcome.

What You'll Do in Your First 30 Days

• You've mapped how we build, deploy, and run today and delivered a clear read on risk (secrets, single points of failure, "only this person knows")
• You've shipped at least one real improvement: pipeline, environment, monitoring, or a painful manual step made automatic
• You can deploy and roll back without tribal knowledge
• You've stood up (or cleaned up) the signals we'll actually look at — deploys, errors, saturation
• The team treats you as the default for "is production okay?" and "how does this get to prod?"

What You'll Do Ongoing

• Own CI/CD — builds, tests, deploys, and rollbacks that the product team can use without you in the loop every time
• Run the cloud — AWS, GCP, or Azure: compute, networking, storage, IAM, and cost that isn't on fire
• Infrastructure as code — Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent; click-ops is the exception, not the system
• Observe production — logs, metrics, alerts that mean something, and the first 15 minutes of an incident
• Harden the path to launch — secrets, backups, staging vs prod, and the minimum reliability bar
• Unblock deploys — when a release is stuck, you're the person who knows the pipeline, not the feature

What We're Looking For

Must-haves:

• 3–6+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or cloud engineering with production systems you were on the hook for
• Hands-on with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) — IAM, networking, and shipping to it, not just "I took a course"
• You've owned or substantially run CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Circle, Jenkins, or similar)
• Infrastructure as code in anger (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK, CloudFormation, or equivalent)
• You can debug a failing deploy and a sick service — not just write YAML that worked once
• Strong async communicator — you document how prod works so the company isn't a single point of failure

Nice-to-have:

• Kubernetes, containers, and the judgment of when not to use them at our stage
• Observability stack experience (Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, or similar)
• A GitHub repo or write-up of infra you've actually run
• Comfortable in fast-moving, ambiguous environments

What You're NOT

• Not a product / feature developer — you don't own the web UI, iOS app, or application tickets; those are separate postings
• Not a junior software developer — we need someone who has already run cloud and pipelines in production
• Not a "I can also do DevOps" full-stack hire — infra is the whole job
• Not a 24/7 NOC or helpdesk role — you'll be on the hook for production, not password resets