Staff DevOps Engineer (Pacific Standard Timezone)

**Company Description:** At Right-Hand, our mission is to make humans more defensible against cyber threats. With roughly 82% of breaches caused by human error, we are building the next-generation Human Risk Management platform that changes employee behaviors and quantifies and reduces human risk to reduce burdensome security alerts for security teams. The daily fulfillment of this mission would not be possible without the cornerstone of Right-Hand’s business - its people. We firmly believe that if we take care of our employees, they will take care of our customers, and the rest will work itself out. The founding team at Right-Hand has created a culture that evangelises six core values: **Resilience**: We solve problems and overcome challenges to the best of our ability, regardless of how daunting they may appear. **Empathy**: We listen to and understand the perspective of others, including our peers, customers, partners and investors. **Passion**: We care deeply about our work, our customers, each other and this company. **Accountability**: We trust each other to get our job done at a high level. **Transparency**: We act and communicate openly, honestly, and effectively to drive toward positive outcomes. **Authenticity**: We understand who we are and will surround ourselves with a diverse group of people who complement our skillset and share our values. If you want to join this mission-driven team and believe you fit the profile below, let’s talk! **Technologies We Use:** Cloud: AWS(Primary), GCP, Azure Containers: Docker, ECS(Fargate), EKS (future-ready) Infrastructure as Code: Terraform CI/CD: GitHub Actions Observability: CloudWatch, New Relic Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis/Valkey, MongoDB, DynamoDB Languages: Ruby-on-Rails, Python, Go, Bash Get to know the Role: As a Staff DevOps Engineer, you will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for defining and elevating our cloud platform architecture, reliability standards, and DevSecOps practices. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will design scalable infrastructure patterns, establish operational standards, mentor engineers, and ensure our cloud systems are secure, resilient, observable, and cost-efficient. You will partner closely with Engineering, Data, Security, and Product leadership to align platform strategy with company growth. **Role Responsibilities:** **Platform Architecture & Ownership** * Own and evolve production-grade AWS infrastructure. * Define reusable Terraform modules and infrastructure standards. * Architect scalable, highly available SaaS platform patterns. * Guide container orchestration strategy (ECS/Fargate, Kubernetes where appropriate). **Reliability & Operations** * Lead complex production incident troubleshooting and RCA. * Improve MTTR and system resilience through automation. * Establish organization-wide observability standards, including logging, metrics, tracing, and incident response frameworks. * Establish SLOs and reliability benchmarks. **DevSecOps & Governance** * Implement and enforce cloud security best practices (IAM least privilege, network isolation, encryption). * Embed compliance-ready infrastructure (SOC 2, GDPR alignment). * Drive vulnerability management and infrastructure security automation. **CI/CD & Developer Enablement** * Architect secure, scalable CI/CD pipelines. * Improve developer deployment velocity without compromising security. * Drive Infrastructure as Code adoption across teams. * Reduce operational toil through automation. **Strategic Impact** * Provide technical mentorship to senior engineers and define platform engineering standards across teams. * Influence infrastructure architectural decisions across engineering. * Drive cost optimization and FinOps governance. * Evaluate new technologies and define adoption strategies. **The Day-to-Day Activities:** * Operate in the EST time zone while collaborating across global teams. * Lead infrastructure design discussions for new features and platform initiatives. * Review and improve Terraform modules and infrastructure patterns. * Architect and optimize CI/CD pipelines to balance speed, reliability, and security. * Monitor production systems, identify systemic risks, and proactively eliminate reliability bottlenecks. * Troubleshoot complex production issues across networking, compute, containers, and databases. * Lead incident response efforts and conduct structured root cause analyses. * Define and refine observability standards (metrics, logging, tracing). * Work closely with application engineers to improve deployment workflows and runtime stability. * Implement and audit IAM policies, secrets management, and network isolation practices. * Drive automation to reduce manual operational toil. * Evaluate trade-offs between performance, scalability, cost, and security. * Mentor engineers and raise overall DevOps maturity across the organization. * Contribute to long-term platform roadmap and infrastructure strategy. **The Must Haves:** * 9-14+ years of hands-on experience in DevOps, SRE, or Cloud Engineering. * Deep production experience in AWS (Primary); Azure/GCP exposure is a plus. * Advanced expertise in ECS or Kubernetes, containerized microservices architectures. * Experience designing and operating infrastructure for high-scale SaaS environments with strong availability and performance requirements. * Proven experience designing and operating multi-region cloud architectures to enable disaster recovery, high availability, and globally resilient platforms. * Strong hands-on experience with Terraform (Primary) and modular IaC design. * Solid CI/CD experience (GitHub Actions preferred). * Strong Linux, networking, and distributed systems fundamentals. * Strong understanding of cloud security design and enforcement. * Proven experience integrating and managing vulnerability and code quality tools such as SonarCloud, Snyk, and container/IaC scanners within CI/CD pipelines. * Experience defining and enforcing quality gates aligned with security and compliance requirements. * Proven ability to resolve complex production incidents. * Strong systems thinking and architectural trade-off evaluation. * High ownership mindset and cross-team influence capability. * Excellent communication and technical leadership skills. **Qualifications & Skills:** * Expertise in AWS, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD tooling, scripting (Bash, Python, Go preferred). * Strong understanding of distributed systems and SaaS scaling patterns. * Experience defining platform standards and best practices. * Ability to influence engineering roadmaps and drive execution. **Nice to Have:** * Experience supporting Rails production systems. * Familiarity with SOC 2, GDPR, or compliance audits. * Experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry). * Experience in SaaS or cybersecurity environments. * Exposure to FinOps practices. * MLOps or AIOps exposure is a plus. **Our Benefits:** Yes our benefits are great but we hope you want to work at Right-Hand because you believe in our mission to make humans more defensible against cyber threats. * Competitive Salary * Paid annual and medical leaves * Flexibility in how and where you work * Generous parental leave programs * and more Diversity and Inclusion are more than just words for us. Our commitment to inclusion across gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, educational background, religion, ability, socioeconomic background, immigration statuses, and experiences drives us forward every day. We foster an open, tolerant, and constructive work environment with a team consisting of diverse views and backgrounds. Right-Hand is an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment including the decision to hire and promote will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We encourage all interested applicants to apply.