DevOps Engineer – Startup Environment

About the Role

We’re looking for a hands-on DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer who enjoys building systems that actually run in production — not slide decks.

You’ve seen early-stage chaos, fast scale-ups, or have built serious infrastructure on your own. You understand that reliability is earned through ownership, automation, and clean engineering — not titles or years of experience.

You will take approved system architecture and turn it into real, working infrastructure, translating High-Level Designs (HLD) into practical, battle-tested Low-Level Designs (LLD).

This is a deeply execution-focused role.

You will work close to production systems every day - deploying, scaling, observing, fixing, and improving them continuously.

At Smallest, infrastructure is not a support function - it is the product.

What We Care About (More Than Experience)

We do not care about years of experience.

We care about:

• Your ability to design and operate systems that don’t fall over

• Your instinct to determine what to automate and when to automate

• Your understanding of how systems behave under real traffic

• Your willingness to take ownership when production breaks

• Your ability to debug calmly, fix permanently, and document clearly

• You are flexible and agile

If you’ve learned these skills through startups, side projects, homelabs, open source, or real production failures - you’re qualified.

Key Responsibilities

• Implement and manage AWS-centric cloud infrastructure using Terraform

• Operate Kubernetes (EKS) clusters across multiple environments

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions

• Deploy services using Helm and Argo CD (GitOps)

• Implement canary, blue/green, and rolling deployments

• Build and manage Docker images and registries

• Configure monitoring, alerting, and logging using New Relic and CloudWatch

• Manage AWS networking: VPCs, subnets, routing, ALB/NLB, security groups

• Support RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Redis, and MongoDB infrastructure

• Support frontend delivery using CloudFront and AWS Amplify

• Write automation scripts in Bash, Python, or Go

• Troubleshoot incidents and participate in postmortems

Required Skill Set

• Strong hands-on experience with AWS and Kubernetes

• Terraform-based infrastructure automation

• Helm and GitOps-based deployment workflows

• Solid Linux and networking fundamentals

• CI/CD pipeline design and ownership mindset

• Production debugging and incident handling experience

Strong Plus

• Startup or scale-up production exposure

• DevOps/SRE side projects or homelabs

• Open-source contributions in cloud-native ecosystem

• Experience with cost optimization and capacity planning

• Knowledge of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets

Mindset We Value

• High ownership and accountability

• Comfort working in ambiguity

• Automation-first thinking

• Reliability over velocity without safety

• Strong bias toward learning from failures

If you enjoy building infrastructure that scales, fixing real production problems, and making systems boringly reliable - this role is for you.