Principal DevOps Engineer

🎯 Role

As a Principal DevOps Engineer, you'll work with the Head of Platform Engineering to deliver the infrastructure foundation powering our AI-driven education platform that serves millions of learners. You'll help execute our serverless AWS strategy, improve reliability toward 99.99% uptime, and raise the bar for scale, security, and developer velocity. You'll partner closely with engineering leadership to turn the infrastructure roadmap into production-ready systems and standards.

🛠️ Sample projects could include…

• Designing and implementing Infrastructure as Code using tools like Terraform, AWS CDK, Pulumi, or similar to provision complete Dev, Staging, and Production environments across AWS, Supabase, Neo4j, Vercel and third-party services.

• Building disaster recovery plans, RTO / RPO targets, multi-region deployment templates, DNS failover, and quarterly DR simulation runbooks.

• Simplifying our infrastructure by migrating legacy services to a fully serverless architecture using AWS Lambda and Terraform.

• Designing a self-healing infrastructure layer that automatically detects and resolves common production issues.

• Improving database performance by optimizing our graph database (Neo4j) and vector search infrastructure.

• Driving developer velocity by building a platform that enables product engineers to ship code to production safely in minutes.

• Working with the Head of Platform Engineering to deliver infrastructure roadmaps, security standards, and pragmatic rollout plans.

• Implementing OpenTelemetry across Lambda, Hono, and Next.js services, with structured logs, distributed traces, key service metrics, and actionable alerting through Better Stack or similar platforms.

🤝 You might be a fit if you…

• Have 8+ years of DevOps/SRE experience with deep expertise in AWS serverless architectures.

• Have strong hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, AWS CDK, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or similar.

• Have a strong background in database reliability engineering (PostgreSQL, Neo4j, Redis).

• Are obsessed with observability and have experience implementing comprehensive monitoring/tracing (Datadog, OpenTelemetry).

• Have a security-first mindset and experience with compliance standards (SOC2, FERPA).

• Write high-quality, maintainable code in TypeScript, Python, or Go.

• Have DevSecOps experience, including secure CI/CD, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, policy-as-code, or security automation.

• Can balance long-term architectural vision with immediate business needs.

🎁 Benefits

• Fully remote and async-friendly

• Health insurance coverage

• Monthly wellness stipend

• Paid time off plus national holidays

• Learning resources and professional development support

• One-time home office setup stipend

• Flexible working hours

💰 Compensation (California)

• Base salary range: $150,000–$200,000 USD

• Compensation is determined based on level, relevant experience, and scope of ownership.

• This role is open to candidates operating at Senior through Staff-level scope.

• Equity and benefits are offered in addition to base compensation.

We’re happy to discuss leveling and compensation expectations early in the interview process.