Staff DevOps Engineer

📋 Description

• • Architect and own the next-generation DevOps roadmap in partnership with the VP of Engineering, translating business goals into a concrete technical strategy that scales with Zippy’s explosive growth in the manufactured-home lending market.
• • Serve as the go-to authority on all things CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and security; design and continuously optimize pipelines that push code from GitHub Actions to AWS production dozens of times per day with zero-downtime deployments.
• • Build and harden Terraform-driven AWS environments (VPC, EKS, RDS Postgres, IAM, KMS, etc.) that are cost-efficient, secure, and compliant; implement blue-green and canary release patterns that protect borrower data and keep loan processing humming 24/7.
• • Establish and evangelize SLOs/SLIs for every critical service—loan origination, pricing engines, document ingestion—using Datadog dashboards, synthetic tests, and distributed tracing so the team sees problems before borrowers do.
• • Lead disaster-recovery planning and quarterly game-days; craft runbooks and chaos-engineering experiments that prove we can failover across regions in <15 minutes with no data loss.
• • Drive cloud-cost optimization initiatives—rightsizing, spot fleets, savings plans—that shave 15-20 % off AWS spend without impacting performance, and present findings to exec stakeholders.
• • Mentor engineers through pairing, brown-bags, and code reviews; create internal “DevOps playbooks” that upskill the entire org on Terraform patterns, secure defaults, and incident-response rituals.
• • Own the security layer: enforce CIS benchmarks, automate patching, integrate SAST/DAST into pipelines, and partner with Security & Compliance to maintain SOC 2 and upcoming ISO 27001 certifications.
• • Collaborate cross-functionally with SRE, Data, and Product teams to deliver high-impact projects such as cloud-to-cloud migrations, PCI-compliant networking, and Kubernetes autoscaling for peak loan-season traffic.
• • Champion a blameless post-mortem culture; turn every incident into a learning opportunity and a stronger system, while keeping MTTR under 30 minutes for P1 issues.
• • Evaluate, pilot, and negotiate with DevOps vendors (e.g., Datadog, HashiCorp, AWS support tiers) ensuring we get maximum ROI and seamless integration with existing tooling.
• • Contribute to the evolution of our monorepo strategy—improve build caching, selective deployments, and trunk-based development workflows that keep 50+ microservices manageable.
• • Bring a teacher’s mindset: run monthly “DevOps Office Hours” where backend, mobile, and QA engineers can deep-dive on topics like Terraform state management or advanced Datadog queries.
• • Influence architectural decisions early by participating in design reviews, ensuring new services are observable, secure, and deployable from day one.
• • Maintain an always-on production mindset—join a light on-call rotation, but more importantly, build automation that makes 3 a.m. pages a rare event.
• • Celebrate wins loudly in our vibrant Slack community (#devops-wins, #pets, #travel) and embody Zippy’s core values: Lead with Passion, Own It, Build a Better Way, Results Driven, and The Golden Rule.