DevOps Engineer

Role As our DevOps Engineer, you will own the infrastructure that powers APAS's AI products for water utilities and the engineering firms that serve them. You'll be the first dedicated DevOps hire at an early-stage startup, which means you're not maintaining someone else's system. You're building it. You'll help us make and execute a foundational decision that's still open: AWS vs. Azure. From there, you'll stand up our cloud environment, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring from the ground up using infrastructure as code, so that every environment is reproducible and every deployment is safe. Our core product runs on a knowledge graph and ontology layer, so you'll work closely with the data and engineering team to keep that infrastructure performant and secure, especially since we handle regulatory and government data. You'll report directly to the CEO, with the autonomy to make real infrastructure decisions and the responsibility that comes with it. As we grow, you'll help us think through the infrastructure implications of scaling across borders and teams. This is a builder role for someone who wants ownership from day one, not a maintenance role for someone who wants a system already in place. This is not a job you'll do in a silo . Expect tight and transparent communication loops across our team. Must Have 5+ years hands-on DevOps/infrastructure experience, ideally with time at an early-stage startup where they built infra from scratch rather than just maintained someone else's setup Real production experience with AWS and/or Azure, and ideally enough judgment to help us actually close out the AWS vs. Azure decision, not just execute on one that's already made Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or equivalent). We need someone who stands up environments repeatably, not by hand CI/CD pipeline design and ownership (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar) Docker required. Container orchestration experience (Kubernetes or equivalent) strongly preferred Solid Linux administration and networking fundamentals: VPCs, DNS, load balancing, security groups Security basics for cloud infra: IAM, secrets management, encryption in transit/at rest. We touch government and utility data, so this isn't optional Production database operations. Comfortable managing, tuning, and backing up databases, not just querying them Monitoring/observability setup from zero (CloudWatch, Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, etc.) Can operate as a solo or near-solo DevOps function, self-directed, low oversight needed Direct, clear communicator. This person works straight with founders and engineers, with no buffer of a big ops team Nice to Have Experience with graph databases or triple stores (GraphDB, Jena, Neo4j). Our architecture runs on a knowledge graph/ontology layer Background in a regulated or compliance-heavy industry: gov contracting, utilities, healthcare, fintech. FedRAMP/StateRAMP/SOC2 exposure is a plus Cost-optimization experience for lean, pre-revenue startups. Every dollar matters right now Exposure to multi-region or multi-entity infrastructure. We're standing up a subsidiary in India, so cross-border considerations will come up Enough Python or Node.js fluency to read and debug application code, not just deploy it Prior experience working directly with founders in a small team, comfortable with ambiguity and fast direction changes General API integration experience, useful given how much of our stack (ATS, ontology tools, etc.) is glued together with integrations Location India, Remote Compensation $1,500 - $2,500 per month