Cloud Operations Lead (Contractor Role – PIU Based Compensation - No Salary)

We are looking for an experienced AWS DevOps Engineer to manage the end-to-end cloud infrastructure, application deployments, CI/CD pipelines, security, monitoring, and production operations. The candidate will work closely with application developers and AI/ML engineers to ensure secure, reliable, scalable, and cost-effective application delivery and operations.

Key Responsibilities

1. AWS Infrastructure Management

• Design, provision, and manage AWS infrastructure, including EC2, S3, RDS PostgreSQL, IAM, VPC, Security Groups, ECR, CloudWatch, and AWS Systems Manager (SSM).
• Manage development, staging, and production environments.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning using Terraform, AWS CDK, or CloudFormation.

2. CI/CD and Application Deployment

• Build and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or equivalent tools.
• Automate application builds, testing, Docker image creation, security scanning, and deployments.
• Manage containerized applications, environment configurations, release approvals, and rollback procedures.
• Deploy and maintain frontend applications, backend APIs, Python/FastAPI services, and supporting components.

3. Database and Storage Management

• Manage PostgreSQL, pgvector, database migrations, S3 storage, backups, and recovery.
• Monitor database performance, connectivity, storage capacity, and resource utilization.
• Ensure safe deployments and migrations without data loss.

4. Security and Compliance

• Implement IAM roles, least-privilege access, secure networking, and encryption.
• Manage application secrets using AWS Secrets Manager or SSM Parameter Store.
• Integrate dependency and container vulnerability scanning into CI/CD pipelines.
• Secure production environments, maintain audit logs, and remediate security vulnerabilities.

5. Monitoring and Production Support

• Configure centralized logging, monitoring, dashboards, alerts, and application health checks using CloudWatch and related tools.
• Troubleshoot deployment failures, application errors, infrastructure issues, and database performance problems.
• Handle production incidents, root-cause analysis, and preventive improvements.
• Maintain operational runbooks and deployment documentation.

6. AI/ML Workload Support

• Support deployment and operation of Python-based AI/ML and LLM-powered services.
• Manage infrastructure for document processing, data ingestion, AI analysis, and report generation.
• Monitor external LLM API availability, latency, usage, and costs.
• Implement appropriate retries, timeouts, rate limits, and failure-handling mechanisms.

7. Scalability, Cost Optimization, and Recovery

• Optimize AWS resource utilization, performance, availability, and operating costs.
• Configure load balancing, autoscaling, and background processing where required.
• Establish and test backup, restoration, and disaster recovery procedures.
• Define recovery objectives and maintain documentation for incident response and business continuity.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or a related field.
• Minimum 5 years of hands-on DevOps or Cloud Engineering experience.
• Strong practical experience managing AWS infrastructure end to end.
• Experience with GitHub Actions or equivalent CI/CD tools, Docker, and Amazon ECR.
• Hands-on knowledge of EC2, S3, RDS PostgreSQL, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, and AWS Systems Manager.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, preferably Terraform.
• Strong Linux administration, shell scripting, networking, DNS, and TLS/SSL knowledge.
• Experience with database operations, backups, security, monitoring, and production troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with Python, REST APIs, and containerized application deployments.
• Understanding of cloud security, vulnerability management, high availability, and disaster recovery.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting AI/ML, Generative AI, LLM, or data-intensive applications.
• Familiarity with AWS Bedrock, SQS, Lambda, and ECS/Fargate.
• Knowledge of PostgreSQL, pgvector, and asynchronous processing.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, and application performance monitoring.
• AWS certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect or AWS DevOps Engineer.

Additional Information -PIU’s:

This role is structured as a contract engagement and includes participation in the company’s Profits Interest Unit (PIU) program. PIUs provide contributors with the opportunity to share in the future growth and success of the company as key milestones are achieved. Units vest based on the successful completion of agreed project deliverables and represent participation in future profit and value appreciation above a defined threshold. Please note that this is an independent contractor role and does not include employee benefits.