Senior DevOps Engineer (AWS)
Sole infrastructure owner
US remote · $85K–$140K base
Education Sector
The AWS estate has grown across five accounts without a single owner. The engineer who looked after it has left and the CTO is covering it alongside everything else. You would take it over end to end, reporting to the CTO.
- The deployment pipeline remains the responsibility of the application engineering team.
- This is an individual contributor position with no direct reports and no platform team to build.
Stack
EC2, ASG, ALB, IAM, Organizations, Security Hub, WAFv2, CloudWatch, Systems Manager, Aurora MySQL, ElastiCache, S3, SES, Route 53, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Terraform and CloudFormation, GitLab CI, Docker/ECR/ECS. Applications are PHP/Laravel on nginx/Apache/PHP-FPM.
Key Responsibilities
- Consolidate the five-account estate under a coherent governance model: AWS Organizations, service control policies, cross-account roles and least-privilege IAM.
- Deploy AWS Security Hub across all accounts and raise the security posture measurably. The primary account currently scores in the low 80s.
- Maintain the EC2 fleet, including patching, currency of underlying technologies, and Auto Scaling and load-balancing readiness ahead of peak fundraising periods.
- Establish production-grade observability through CloudWatch metrics, alarms and dashboards.
- Manage WAF configuration, edge services and private access tooling.
- Over time, contribute to capacity planning, cost management and, where the individual has the appetite, application engineering on the PHP/Laravel platform.
- The role is front-loaded. The consolidation and security programme dominates the initial period, after which the scope broadens.
Candidate Profile
- Four or more years of hands-on DevOps or cloud infrastructure experience, including a sustained period of three to five years owning a production AWS estate.
- Demonstrable experience remediating or consolidating a multi-account AWS environment, including IAM and cross-account design.
- Depth in EC2-based infrastructure: fleet management, patching, scaling and availability.
- Established practice of using AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor or equivalent) in day-to-day infrastructure work, with a clear method for validating their output.
- Comfortable operating independently with minimal direction in a small, remote team.
- Based in the United States with permanent authorisation to work. Visa sponsorship is not available now or in future.
- PHP/Laravel or MySQL operational experience.
- Terraform at production scale.
- Experience leading incident response and root-cause analysis.
- AWS certifications, current or lapsed.
- A bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline.