Cloud DevOps Team Lead
Role Overview
Own the technical direction of a high-scale AWS SaaS platform, raising the bar on reliability, resilience, and cost discipline as we grow into larger enterprise environments.
Act as the technical authority within the Cloud team, ensuring uptime, operational maturity, and architectural evolution stay ahead of demand — with clear ownership of reliability metrics, service health, and infrastructure efficiency.
Increase platform resilience and enterprise readiness while maintaining disciplined control of uptime, risk, and infrastructure cost at scale. This role is about building durable systems — not chasing trends.
Enable and empower development teams to ship confidently to Cloud by strengthening deployment capabilities, improving DORA metrics, and establishing highly automated, asynchronous processes that support regular, reliable global delivery as the platform scales.
Reporting to the Software Engineering Manager, the Cloud DevOps Tech Lead sets technical direction and decision authority for the Cloud platform, owning architecture, reliability standards, SLO alignment, and infrastructure evolution across an AWS-based SaaS environment.
Why This Role
• Technical authority with accountability: own architectural direction, reliability standards, and infrastructure evolution, while ensuring alignment with approved budgets, business priorities, and investment governance.
• Own measurable reliability outcomes: drive uptime, SLO adherence, MTTR reduction, and systemic incident elimination.
• Enterprise impact at scale: evolve the Cloud platform to meet increasing expectations around uptime, auditability, security, and performance.
• Cost governance as a core responsibility: scale infrastructure deliberately while maintaining disciplined control of the cost base.
• 100% remote within New Zealand: permanent full-time employment with flexibility, trust, and long-term platform ownership.
What You Will Own
Platform Reliability & Operations
• Own uptime, resilience, and operational health of an AWS-hosted SaaS platform.
• Define and drive SLOs, improve MTTR, and reduce incident frequency through structural improvements.
• Lead high-impact incident response and ensure root cause elimination, not surface fixes.
• Strengthen operational discipline, observability, and service health transparency.
• Produce clear infrastructure health, risk, and reliability reporting for leadership.
Infrastructure Evolution & Enterprise Readiness
• Lead platform modernisation initiatives such as containerisation and infrastructure refactoring where they deliver clear operational or scalability benefit.
• Architect scalable, resilient systems that support enterprise growth without unnecessary complexity.
• Strengthen monitoring, alerting, and audit readiness.
• Maintain disciplined infrastructure cost control while scaling — ensuring performance and reliability gains are achieved responsibly.
Engineering Enablement & Technical Standards
• Set and uphold the technical bar within the Cloud team.
• Act as arbiter on team-level architecture decisions and technical debt prioritisation.
• Mentor engineers and elevate systems thinking, operational judgment, and cost awareness.
• Drive Infrastructure-as-Code rigor, automation maturity, and documentation standards.
• Embed responsible AI-assisted workflows that improve testing, documentation, IaC consistency, and review quality without increasing operational risk.
Strategic Contribution & Delivery Alignment
• Contribute technical input to roadmap and capacity planning.
• Assess infrastructure risk and trade-offs across initiatives.
• Align platform decisions with business priorities and enterprise commitments.
• Champion pragmatic, high-leverage solutions that ship safely, incrementally, and measurably improve reliability.
What You Bring
• 8+ years in DevOps, Cloud Infrastructure, or similar roles within high-volume SaaS environments.
• 3+ years in technical or team leadership with architectural decision ownership.
• Deep experience operating and scaling AWS-based infrastructure.
• Proven track record improving uptime, reducing incidents, and lowering MTTR.
• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code capability and solid programming skills.
• Demonstrated cost-aware infrastructure design and governance.
• Strong security and vulnerability mitigation knowledge.
• Experience working in distributed environments with strong written communication.
Strong Signals
• Experience scaling infrastructure to meet enterprise customer requirements.
• Experience implementing SLO frameworks and operational maturity models.
• Exposure to heterogeneous hosting environments.
• Strong SQL and database performance optimisation knowledge.
• Experience embedding AI-assisted workflows to improve design quality, IaC consistency, documentation standards, and review rigour.
• Track record of influencing technical standards without relying on formal authority.
Compensation & Benefits
• Competitive salary.
• Permanent, full-time employment.
• 100% remote role (must be based in New Zealand).
• Flexible working hours.
• Home office equipment provided.
• 25 days annual leave plus public holidays.
• Private health insurance.
• Professional development support.
• Volunteering leave.
• Compassionate leave, including pet loss.
• Inclusive, remote-first culture and great work culture.
Location
100% remote – New Zealand.
Some cross-timezone work will be required.
Hiring Process
• Recruiter screening.
• Online aptitude test (approx. 1 hour).
• First technical interview (approx. 1 hour).
• Take home project (up to 4 hours).
• Final interview (approx. 1.5 hours).
Career Trajectory
Engineering uses a structured career development framework, allowing you to co-design your next career steps and plan development opportunities aligned with both organisational and individual growth.
Diversity & Inclusion
Committed to building an inclusive workplace and welcoming applicants from all backgrounds. Diverse perspectives strengthen teams and improve the products we build.
