DevOps Engineer (Part Time)

Role overview

Part-time DevOps Engineer based in a US time zone (PT or ET), providing engineering coverage during US business hours. This is a hands-on role focused on AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes (EKS) operations, CI/CD, observability, and database operations, with ownership and independent operation, including on-call incident response during your shift.

Core responsibilities

• Infrastructure as Code & AWS
  • Own and evolve Terraform modules for VPC, IAM, EKS, RDS, S3, and networking
  • Provision/manage environments via code (not console)
  • Manage AWS account structure, cost controls, and resource tagging hygiene
• Kubernetes
  • Operate production EKS clusters (upgrades, node groups, autoscaling, RBAC)
  • Maintain Helm charts and deployment manifests
  • Triage cluster issues (networking/ingress, pod scheduling, resource limits)
• CI/CD
  • Build/maintain GitHub Actions (or equivalent) pipelines for build, test, deploy
  • Improve deploy speed, rollback safety, and developer experience
  • Implement progressive delivery (e.g., canary, blue/green) where appropriate
• Observability & On-Call
  • Own metrics/logs/tracing using Prometheus/Grafana/Datadog (or equivalent)
  • Define SLOs and alerts; reduce alert noise
  • Participate in on-call rotation and lead incident response during US hours
  • Run post-incident reviews and drive remediation to completion
• Database operations
  • Manage RDS/Aurora/managed Postgres (backups/restores, failover testing)
  • Perform safe production schema migrations and coordinate with app engineers
  • Monitor performance, tune slow queries, manage connection pooling

Must-haves

• 3–5 years operating production workloads on AWS
• Strong Terraform experience (including refactoring existing modules)
• Production Kubernetes experience on EKS (or comparable managed Kubernetes)
• Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines for non-trivial services
• Scripting fluency in Python, Go, or Bash
• Track record of owning on-call and leading incidents end-to-end
• Must be based in a US time zone (PT or ET)

Nice to haves

• AWS Organizations (Control Tower / Landing Zone) and multi-account setups
• Service mesh experience (Istio/Linkerd) or advanced ingress setups
• Advanced cost optimization (e.g., Savings Plans, rightsizing, Karpenter)
• Security/compliance exposure (SOC2, GDPR, secrets management, IAM hardening)
• Open-source contributions to infrastructure tooling

What they’re looking for

• Operator mindset and strong automation bias
• Clear written communication; comfortable with async work across time zones
• Pragmatic tooling approach; able to be the engineering presence during US hours