DevOps Engineer

Study Now runs Global Student Pathway (GSP), a production education marketplace and student-recruitment platform used daily by counsellors, admissions officers and agent partners across nine destination markets. We have just brought the platform fully in-house, and you will be the person who makes it boringly reliable: deployed safely, monitored properly, backed up provably, and secure enough to hold student visa and identity documents.

What you’ll do

• Assess and harden our estate across Linode and DigitalOcean, fronted by Cloudflare — topology, regions, MongoDB, storage — and own the resilience plan from day one, against defined targets: 99.9% uptime, 4-hour recovery from total provider failure (RTO), no more than 1 hour of data loss (RPO).

• Build the 3-2-1 backup regime: hourly encrypted MongoDB dumps to a second region, automatic off-provider replication, a local encrypted archive — proven by monthly restore drills, not assumed to work.

• Build and maintain CI/CD for our MEAN-stack application so releases ship with zero downtime — rolling restarts behind a load balancer, then blue-green — with the QA team’s automated suite wired in as a release gate.

• Run monitoring, alerting and incident response: uptime, error rates and performance visible at all times, with alerts reaching the right person before users notice; write and rehearse the disaster-recovery runbook.

• Own the security posture: secrets management, access control, Cloudflare WAF and rules, security-audit remediation, and UK GDPR alignment for the student data GSP holds (passports, visa documents, education records).

• Manage cloud costs across providers, report spend monthly, and evaluate consolidation or AWS-based recovery on evidence — our current position is hardened-in-place with off-provider backup.

• Document everything as runbooks usable by our two engineers without you on the call — a small team means no tribal knowledge.

What we’re looking for

• 4+ years running production infrastructure for a live web application, including at least one platform you were personally accountable for.

• Hands-on with the pieces we run: Linux servers on Linode/DigitalOcean (or similar VPS providers), Cloudflare (DNS, caching, WAF), Docker, and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar); infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or Ansible) strongly preferred.

• MongoDB operations in production: replica sets, backups, restores and migrations under load.

• Deploying and operating Node.js applications — our stack is MEAN (MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node).

• Evidence of security thinking: hardening, secrets management, access reviews; experience preparing for or remediating a security audit is a strong plus.

• Comfortable being the only infrastructure person: pragmatic, communicative, biased to documentation and automation over heroics.

Nice to have

Experience in edtech, CRM-style platforms or other systems holding sensitive personal data; UK GDPR / Cyber Essentials familiarity; experience taking over a platform from a departing team.

Working with us

Remote from India, employed through an employer-of-record or as a direct contractor (agreed at offer). Company laptop provided.