DevOps Lead

About us Founded in Sydney in 2014, ezyCollect by Sidetrade is Australia's leading Order-to-Cash platform for small and mid-sized businesses. We automate credit management, collections, and payments - taking the manual work out of getting paid. Our 1,100+ customers manage A$19 billion in receivables through the platform, typically cutting late payments by 40% and bad debt by 80% within three months. Now part of global AI leader Sidetrade, we're scaling our reach across three continents - bringing enterprise-grade technology to the mid-market while staying true to our Sydney roots. The opportunity As we transition from a traditional SaaS company to an AI-first platform, our infrastructure must scale with us. The DevOps Lead owns the delivery pipeline, platform reliability, cloud economics and security posture that make that growth possible. This is a hands-on leadership position: you set technical direction for the DevOps function, mentor a small team, and personally tackle the hardest engineering problems alongside them. You will act as the connective tissue between Development, Product, Security and IT Operations, ensuring every team can ship faster and run safer. Key responsibilities Strategy and architecture. Engage with engineering, product and operations stakeholders to research, consult on and evaluate program and platform needs; translate them into a DevOps roadmap that aligns with where the business is heading. Continuous delivery. Design, build and operate CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI, GoCD, Python automation) and develop continuous improvement and continuous delivery strategies across system design and software development — reducing lead time, lifting deployment frequency and keeping recovery times tight. Software and automation development. Write and maintain code and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Python, Bash) to meet documented system requirements, designs and technical specifications, in line with our quality and accredited engineering standards. Testing, debugging and quality. Manage testing and automation of software and application deployments; test, debug, diagnose and correct errors and faults in pipelines, automation scripts and supporting code — including technical security controls — within established testing protocols, guidelines and quality standards. Platform reliability and operations. Keep critical infrastructure (Kubernetes/EKS clusters, Aurora MySQL, MongoDB, domains, SSL certificates) rock-solid through robust monitoring, alerting and incident response using Datadog, Grafana and AWS CloudWatch. Operational metrics and reporting. Collect and analyse operational metrics (DORA metrics, reliability, cost-to-serve) and report regularly to leadership so progress is visible and surprises are not. Cost and vendor advisory. Provide advice, guidance and expertise in developing proposals and strategies for software, tooling and cloud design — including financial evaluation and costings to support recommendations on software purchases, upgrades, reservations and vendor commitments. Security, encryption and risk. Identify and mitigate risks that may affect the performance and security of the platform throughout its lifecycle. Own encryption and decryption practices across data at rest and in transit (KMS, certificates, secrets management), and uphold hardening standards as a pillar of our SOC 2 compliance program. Incident response and forensics. Lead high-severity incident response and perform forensic analysis to identify anomalies and threats; run regular disaster recovery exercises and post-incident reviews to improve resilience. Tooling and developer experience. Create and develop the internal tools required to support our software and its management and security — from golden-path templates to chatops and AI agents that augment incident triage, deployment and platform workflows. Documentation and standards. Write, update and maintain technical, end-user and operational documentation, runbooks and procedures so the platform is understood, supportable and auditable. Cross-team collaboration. Facilitate communication, collaboration, integration and automation across development, security, product and IT operations specialist teams to lift overall efficiency and workflow. Team leadership. Mentor DevOps engineers, run training, set hiring standards and create an environment where engineers stretch into bigger problems. Skills, experience and qualifications Bachelor degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology or a closely related discipline. Relevant senior industry experience and recognised vendor certifications (for example AWS Solutions Architect Professional, CKA/CKAD, HashiCorp Terraform Associate) may substitute the formal qualification. Minimum 8 years’ experience designing and operating production cloud infrastructure at scale, including at least 2 years in a technical lead or equivalent capacity. Demonstrated expertise across the AWS ecosystem (Lambda, S3, RDS, EC2, SQS, EKS) or equivalent depth in Azure / GCP. Strong hands-on capability with containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS), infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation) and modern observability stacks (Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch). Proven track record building and operating CI/CD pipelines, with working knowledge of CircleCI, GoCD or comparable tooling. Proficiency in Python and Bash; familiarity with Java and JavaScript/TypeScript is an advantage. Practical understanding of cloud cost optimisation, security posture management and compliance frameworks such as SOC 2. Experience leading high-severity production incidents and the post-mortems that follow, with strong written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical audiences. Our tech stack Cloud & infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, S3, RDS, EC2, SQS, EKS), Aurora MySQL, MongoDB. IaC: Terraform, CloudFormation. CI/CD: CircleCI, GoCD, Python. Containers: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS). Workflow: Temporal. Observability: Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch. Security & edge: Cloudflare, AWS security tooling. Languages: Python, Bash, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript. What we offer ​​​​​​​Hybrid working (3 days in office), work-from-anywhere policy, generous parental leave and flexible leave. Annual training budget, dedicated coaching and exposure to multiple facets of the business. WeWork office on Pitt Street with 24/7 access, on-site barista and bar, plus optional active lunch sessions. Quarterly social events, monthly virtual entertainment and a collaborative engineering culture. Employee referral bonuses and the chance to work on a product customers genuinely love.