Reports to

Role summary

What you’ll do

• Own Kipu’s cloud infrastructure strategy across AWS and Azure, including architecture decisions, cost optimization, and capacity planning.
• Drive reliability and availability targets, establishing and maintaining SLAs/SLOs that align with customer and business expectations.
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident review processes to continuously improve system resilience.
• Manage infrastructure budgets and optimize cloud spend without sacrificing performance or security.
• Write Python, Bash, and other scripts daily to automate operations, solve problems, and improve workflows. Own and evolve infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK, Ansible).
• Maintain, upgrade, and develop internal DevOps applications and automation tools used across the organization.

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions) that enable engineering teams to ship with speed and confidence.
• Establish release engineering standards, including deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, feature flags) and rollback procedures.
• Reduce build times, flaky tests, and deployment friction across the engineering organization.
• Serve as the infrastructure partner for product engineering teams spinning up new services—own the process of onboarding each service into CI/CD, container platforms (Kubernetes, ECS), and cloud infrastructure.
• Drive standardization of service deployment patterns, infrastructure templates, and operational runbooks across all teams.

• Ensure infrastructure meets HIPAA, SOC 2, and other regulatory requirements, partnering with security and compliance teams on audits and remediation.
• Implement and enforce infrastructure security best practices, including network segmentation, IAM policies, secrets management, and encryption at rest and in transit.
• Maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans, including regular testing and validation.
• Own security risk identification, assessment, and remediation across the infrastructure—proactively identify vulnerabilities and drive fixes across cloud resources.
• Manage security patching, hardening, and compliance remediation at scale across AWS and Azure environments.

• Build and evolve Kipu’s observability stack: monitoring, alerting, dashboards, logging, and distributed tracing (Datadog, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor).
• Establish a data-driven approach to reliability, using SLIs and error budgets to balance velocity with stability.
• Proactively identify and address infrastructure risks before they become customer-facing incidents.
• Design and enforce observability standards for every new service—ensure teams ship with proper metrics, logging, and alerting from day one.
• Provide production support and operational guidance to other engineering teams across the organization.

• Lead and mentor two managers and their teams, plus direct IC reports (~13 total headcount), fostering a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Define team structure, hiring plans, and career development paths as the organization scales.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, product, and security leadership to align infrastructure priorities with business goals.

What success looks like

• Completed assessment of current infrastructure, CI/CD, and observability maturity with a prioritized improvement roadmap.
• Established working relationships with engineering, product, and security leadership.
• Identified and addressed the highest-impact reliability or deployment risks.

• Measurable improvements in deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate.
• Observability stack delivering actionable insights, with reduced mean time to detection and resolution.
• Infrastructure cost model in place with identified optimization opportunities being executed.

• DevOps and CloudOps team operating as a high-performing, trusted partner to the broader engineering organization.
• Infrastructure reliably supports Kipu’s platform consolidation, AI workloads, and customer growth targets.
• Compliance posture strengthened with audit-ready documentation and automated controls.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, CloudOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering, with at least 3 years leading teams.
• Deep expertise in AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager), including networking, compute, storage, and cost optimization.
• Strong background in CI/CD pipeline design, release engineering, and deployment automation.
• Experience operating infrastructure in a HIPAA-compliant or similarly regulated environment.
• Proven track record building and maintaining observability stacks (monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing).
• Infrastructure-as-code fluency: Terraform (required), AWS CDK, with familiarity in CloudFormation or Pulumi. Experience with configuration management tools (Ansible preferred).
• Experience managing containerized workloads at scale (Kubernetes, ECS, or similar).
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, develop, and retain strong infrastructure engineering talent.
• Working experience with Azure cloud services (Azure DevOps, AKS, Azure Monitor, or equivalent).
• Strong scripting, coding, and automation skills in Python and Bash—you write code daily, not occasionally.
• Experience building, maintaining, and upgrading internal tools and applications.
• Experience with security risk management, vulnerability remediation, and compliance-driven patching across cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to manage managers and lead through others while remaining technically engaged.
• High personal integrity, strong work ethic, and a commitment to doing the right thing under pressure.

Nice to have

• Experience with Azure, particularly in a multi-cloud or hybrid environment.
• Healthcare SaaS or multi-tenant platform experience.
• SOC 2 or HITRUST audit experience, including evidence collection and control implementation.
• Background supporting data-intensive or AI/ML infrastructure workloads.
• Experience leading platform migrations or major infrastructure modernization efforts.
• Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost governance at scale.
• Experience with PostgreSQL administration and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with Datadog, Grafana, PagerDuty, and building observability-as-code.
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional) or Azure equivalents.
• Experience with service mesh, API gateways, or zero-trust networking models.
• Familiarity with Ruby on Rails, Node.js, or Spring Boot application ecosystems (the services your team will support).

Leadership qualities and culture fit

• Leads by example—rolls up their sleeves and works alongside the team, not from a distance.
• Takes ownership and accountability for outcomes, not just tasks.
• Operates with high ethical standards and transparency in all decisions.
• Demonstrates commitment and reliability—follows through on promises and is present when it matters.
• Builds trust through technical credibility and genuine care for team growth.
• Communicates directly and honestly, escalating risks and issues proactively.