Remote DevOps / Cloud Engineer

We're hiring a DevOps / Cloud Engineer to own how we build, deploy, and run production — CI/CD, cloud, observability — not product features and not the web UI. Summary Flexible Title: Can tailor to reflect your skills & experience. Flexible Time: Can do full-time, part-time, side-gig (off-hours), or fractional (contract). Flexible Commitment: Can do short-term, long-term, or intermittent. Infra is the job. If you want to ship product tickets in React or own application features, our software-developer postings are the ones to apply to — not this one. Why so flexible? We're a FUNDED startup racing to launch end of Q3 2026. That gives us just 3 months to stack features while raising additional working capital. Feel free to jump in, help us ship, then bounce >> or stick around. A successful launch translates into lots of permanent jobs for those that want them. We're also interested in long-term "side gig" relationships, if that's what you're into—in our experience, a few expert hours often beat full-time learning-curve hours. About Us We're a credible, funded, remote-first startup backed by a growing team. We're pre-launch and moving fast. About The Role This is the infra seat our product-engineering postings point away from. You will not be picking up feature tickets, owning the frontend, or being "the full-stack person who also knows AWS." We need someone who has already run cloud in production: pipelines that ship safely, environments that don't rot, IAM that isn't a mess, and the ability to tell why it's down before the rest of the team guesses. You'll own CI/CD, our cloud account(s), deploys, monitoring, and the boring reliability work that makes launch possible. This is ideal for someone with 3–6+ years in DevOps, SRE, or cloud engineering who wants to own the platform at a small startup without becoming an application developer. You'll answer: Can we deploy on Friday without fear? Do we know when production is sick? What's the smallest amount of infra that gets us to launch without a pile of tickets later? Compensation Up to $150,000 max total annual compensation in Tier 1 cities; cash and equity components to be negotiated. Given the flexible commitment model, comp will be structured accordingly — fractional or hourly arrangements welcome. What You'll Do in Your First 30 Days You've mapped how we build, deploy, and run today and delivered a clear read on risk (secrets, single points of failure, "only this person knows") You've shipped at least one real improvement: pipeline, environment, monitoring, or a painful manual step made automatic You can deploy and roll back without tribal knowledge You've stood up (or cleaned up) the signals we'll actually look at — deploys, errors, saturation The team treats you as the default for "is production okay?" and "how does this get to prod?" What You'll Do Ongoing Own CI/CD — builds, tests, deploys, and rollbacks that the product team can use without you in the loop every time Run the cloud — AWS, GCP, or Azure: compute, networking, storage, IAM, and cost that isn't on fire Infrastructure as code — Terraform, CloudFormation, or equivalent; click-ops is the exception, not the system Observe production — logs, metrics, alerts that mean something, and the first 15 minutes of an incident Harden the path to launch — secrets, backups, staging vs prod, and the minimum reliability bar Unblock deploys — when a release is stuck, you're the person who knows the pipeline, not the feature What We're Looking For Must-haves: 3–6+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or cloud engineering with production systems you were on the hook for Hands-on with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) — IAM, networking, and shipping to it, not just "I took a course" You've owned or substantially run CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Circle, Jenkins, or similar) Infrastructure as code in anger (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK, CloudFormation, or equivalent) You can debug a failing deploy and a sick service — not just write YAML that worked once Strong async communicator — you document how prod works so the company isn't a single point of failure Nice-to-have: Kubernetes, containers, and the judgment of when not to use them at our stage Observability stack experience (Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry, or similar) A GitHub repo or write-up of infra you've actually run Comfortable in fast-moving, ambiguous environments What You're NOT Not a product / feature developer — you don't own the web UI, iOS app, or application tickets; those are separate postings Not a junior software developer — we need someone who has already run cloud and pipelines in production Not a "I can also do DevOps" full-stack hire — infra is the whole job Not a 24/7 NOC or helpdesk role — you'll be on the hook for production, not password resets