Senior DevOps Engineer

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.   At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD.    We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived.    We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD. 

AHEAD is looking for a curious and pragmatic Senior DevOps Engineer to join our DevOps team and help build and run the cloud foundation behind Hatch, our flagship platform, and the rest of our application portfolio. We’re a leading IT services provider, trusted by some of the world’s largest companies to design, build, run, and modernize their most important technology across cloud, data, AI, and security. 

Hatch is an advanced platform for IT lifecycle management, renewal, procurement, and logistics, giving enterprises real-time visibility and control over their IT assets, orders, contracts, and inventory across thousands of sites. Unity, its sibling platform, extends those capabilities to streamline our own operations and service delivery. You’ll join a progressive engineering team that lives on the forefront of technology. We build real products, adopt new tools early, sweat the details, and trade ideas constantly. You will learn here, and you’ll have the autonomy to make a visible impact fast. 

Our platforms run on AWS. You’ll share ownership of that foundation with the rest of the DevOps team: the infrastructure as code, the CI/CD pipelines, the observability, and the security posture that let our engineers ship quickly and confidently. You won’t find a static environment here. You’ll work across a variety of challenges, from deployment automation and cost optimization to incident response and platform reliability, in regular collaboration with the software engineers building Hatch, Unity, and the internal services that support them. 

Building in the Age of AI

AI has changed what great engineering looks like, and we’ve leaned in. We expect engineers to use AI tools and coding agents fluently to prototype, explore, and accelerate the routine, so that human time goes to what matters: designing resilient systems, exercising judgment, and verifying that what ships is correct and secure. That applies to operations as much as application code. We’re looking for someone who wields these tools with taste. 

• Reach for AI to move faster on templates, scripts, runbooks, and research, then review every line like you own it, because you do. 
• Spend your judgment where it counts: architecture, reliability, security, and cost. 
• Help push the practice forward with better tooling, prompts, and workflows that make the whole team more effective. 

What Will You Be Doing?

• Own and evolve our AWS environments, managed as infrastructure as code with CloudFormation. 
• Build and maintain GitLab CI/CD pipelines that take code from commit to production quickly and safely. 
• Build out observability in Datadog: monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and the signals that tell us how the platforms are really behaving. 
• Strengthen our security posture: IAM, least privilege, encryption, network boundaries, and the controls that support our SOC2 program. 
• Automate the routine away, from environment provisioning to deployments to operational chores. 
• Share the on-call rotation with the team, lead incident response and postmortems, and drive the fixes that keep problems from repeating. 
• Troubleshoot live production issues across the stack, from container memory and runtime behavior to database load and network paths. 
• Support our databases on Amazon RDS (SQL Server) and Aurora PostgreSQL: performance, capacity, backups, and upgrades. 
• Keep an eye on cost and performance, and tune both as the platforms grow. 
• Work side by side with software engineers to make the platform easy to build on, and mentor the team on operational excellence.

What Does the Ideal Candidate Look Like?

• 5+ years in DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering, with deep hands-on AWS experience. 
• Strong infrastructure-as-code skills. We use CloudFormation; experience with Terraform or similar translates fine. 
• A track record of building and running CI/CD pipelines for real production systems. GitLab CI experience is a plus. 
• Experience with observability tooling, ideally Datadog: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and knowing which signals matter. 
• Solid grounding in cloud security: IAM, encryption, network design, and least-privilege thinking. Experience supporting SOC2 or similar compliance programs is a plus. 
• Experience running containerized workloads with Docker and Amazon ECS on Fargate. Kubernetes experience is a plus. 
• Hands-on experience operating relational databases in production, ideally SQL Server and PostgreSQL on AWS. 
• A methodical approach to troubleshooting live production problems. Experience debugging Elixir/BEAM or JVM services is a plus. 
• Comfortable in at least one scripting language, and fluent with modern AI development tools, paired with the discipline to verify everything you ship. 
• Strong judgment under pressure. You’re comfortable sharing on-call, stay calm in incidents, communicate clearly, and follow through on root causes. 
• Clear, direct communication with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders. 
• A drive to keep learning and to help shape how the team builds and operates. 

Why You’ll Love It Here

• Join a team where innovation and curiosity are the norm. 
• We invest seriously in modern tooling, including the best AI tools, and we’re always looking for the next approach that makes the team better. 
• Competitive salary, benefits, and an environment where work-life balance is more than just a catchphrase. 
• Your work will be felt daily by every engineer on the team and every enterprise that relies on our platforms. 

Make Your Voice Heard

AHEAD recognizes the value of diverse perspectives. In our ever-evolving tech landscape, the insights you bring from your own journey can reshape our collective experience. If you’ve had experiences, both good and challenging, with other platforms, stacks, or ways of operating, they’ll become an asset here. Your voice will help shape how we build, deploy, and run our products. 

The compensation range indicated in this posting reflects the On-Target Earnings (“OTE”) for this role, which includes a base salary and any applicable target bonus amount. This OTE range may vary based on the candidate’s relevant experience, qualifications, and geographic location.    Why AHEAD:   Through our daily work and internal groups like Moving Women AHEAD and RISE AHEAD, we value and benefit from diversity of people, ideas, experience, and everything in between.   We fuel growth by stacking our office with top-notch technologies in a multi-million-dollar lab, by encouraging cross department training and development, sponsoring certifications and credentials for continued learning.   USA Employment Benefits include:  - Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance  - 401(k)  - Paid company holidays  - Paid time off  - Paid parental and caregiver leave  - Plus more! See benefits https://www.aheadbenefits.com/ for additional details.    Use of AI: We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, assessing responses, or to capture recordings and create transcriptions or summaries during interviews. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans.   If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please refer to the Candidate Privacy Notice or contact us at privacy@ahead.com.    You may opt-out of the review or analysis of your application and resume by AI tools by using the General Application. Please include the role you wish to apply for in the Additional Information field. You may also choose to opt-out of recording and transcription at any time, including after joining an interview.  Candidates will not be penalized for choosing to opt-out.
Salary: 140000 - 160000 USD per year