DevOps Engineer / Platform Engineer

About the Role

We are looking for a DevOps / Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate AWS infrastructure that is secure, scalable, and easy for developers to use.

This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure, automation, and developer experience. You’ll work closely with backend and product engineers to remove friction from deployments, improve reliability, and reduce operational toil—while keeping cost, security, and long-term scalability in mind.

What We’re Looking For

We’re not looking for someone who just wires tools together from tutorials. We want someone who understands why systems are designed the way they are, can reason about tradeoffs, can evolve infrastructure as the product grows, and can weave an infrastructure fabric with customer deployments.

We’re looking for someone who consistently optimizes for ease of deployment and a strong developer experience, and who approaches system design from first principles rather than relying solely on established patterns. You should be comfortable owning infrastructure in production environments and making thoughtful decisions that balance reliability, cost, and speed. Security awareness is essential—you understand best practices and risks, but you’re not paralyzed by process or unnecessary complexity. Above all, we value curiosity, sound judgment, and the ability to clearly explain tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical teammates.

Why This Role Matters

In this role, you’ll be shaping the foundation that our engineers—and our customers—build on every day. Your work will directly influence the reliability, velocity, and overall trust in the platform. If you enjoy making complex systems feel simple and enabling others to move faster with confidence, we’d love to talk.

About the Company

With projects that span additive manufacturing, materials development, non-destructive evaluation, and automated R&D Contextualize is a startup focused on fusion, processing, and analysis of scientific and manufacturing data. Our primary goal is to empower domain experts, so they may capture their knowledge through development of interoperable software and infrastructure. Our passion is seeing our customers get more value from their data, their knowledge, and their resources, sharing that value with others, and helping them make a greater impact in their fields.

What You’ll Do

Platform & Infrastructure

· Design and operate AWS infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (non-negotiable)

· Support multiple environments (dev, staging, prod) cleanly and safely

· Build scalable, fault-tolerant systems using:

o EC2, ECS or EKS, Lambda

o VPCs, NAT Gateways, ALBs/NLBs

o Managed databases (RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, Neptune/Neo4j)

· Implement S3 lifecycle policies and cost-aware storage strategies

Automation & CI/CD

· Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using tools such as:

o GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, AWS CodePipeline

· Automate environment provisioning and deployments

· Enable safe rollbacks and repeatable releases

· Reduce manual operations through automation

Observability & Operations

· Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting using:

o CloudWatch, Datadog, OpenTelemetry

· Debug issues across the full stack (application → infrastructure)

· Participate in incident response and post-incident improvements

· Design systems that scale under load without unnecessary complexity

Security & Compliance Awareness

· Apply IAM least-privilege principles consistently

· Design network isolation and secure service-to-service access

· Ensure encryption at rest and in transit

· Manage secrets safely using AWS Secrets Manager and/or SSM

· Enable audit logging and support compliance-aware workflows (PII, ITAR, etc.)

· Rotate keys and credentials as part of normal operations

Backups & Reliability

· Design and manage backup and restore strategies for:

o DynamoDB

o RDS / Aurora

o Databases running in ECS containers

· Understand tradeoffs across SQL, NoSQL, and graph databases

· Validate restoration procedures—not just backups

Developer Enablement

· Make infrastructure easy and safe for product engineers to use

· Document patterns and provide reusable tooling

· Work closely with engineers to choose the right deployment model:

o Serverless vs containerized vs traditional services

· Avoid premature over-engineering while designing for future growth

Light Development Work

· Contribute occasional application changes when needed:

o Refactor services between server-based and serverless models

o Update Node.js or Python runtimes when AWS deprecates versions

o Pick up small backend tickets during slower infrastructure cycles

Required Skills & ExperienceAWS Fundamentals (Strong)

· Hands-on experience designing systems using:

o EC2, ECS or EKS, Lambda

o VPCs, subnets, routing, NAT gateways, load balancers

o IAM (policies, roles, trust relationships)

o S3 lifecycle management

o RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, and graph databases (Neptune or Neo4j)

Infrastructure as Code (Required)

Experience with at least one of:

· Terraform

· AWS CDK + CloudFormation

You should be comfortable:

· Versioning infrastructure

· Reviewing infrastructure changes like application code

· Supporting multiple environments cleanly

CI/CD & Automation

· Building deployment pipelines

· Automating infrastructure provisioning

· Implementing rollback strategies

· Reducing operational toil

Observability & Debugging

· Monitoring and alerting best practices

· Log tracing and root-cause analysis

· Reading stack traces and debugging production issues

· Comfortable with the Linux CLI

Programming

· Moderate experience with:

o Python

o Node.js

· Ability to read, debug, and make targeted changes to production services

Security Awareness

· IAM best practices and secure secrets handling

· Encryption, audit logging, and network security fundamentals

· Awareness of modern security practices and willingness to stay current

Systems Thinking

· Understand tradeoffs between cost, reliability, and speed

· Design for scalability without unnecessary complexity

· Collaborate effectively with product and backend engineers

Nice to Have (Not Required)

· Experience with OpenTelemetry

· Cost optimization strategies (budgets, alerts, forecasting)

· Experience supporting compliance-sensitive workloads

· Exposure to graph databases or data-intensive platforms

Pay: $115,000.00 - $135,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Health insurance
• Paid time off

People with a criminal record are encouraged to apply

Application Question(s):

• What attracted you to this position and what experiences do you feel are particularly relevant?

Experience:

• AWS: 3 years (Preferred)

Location:

• United States (Preferred)

Work Location: Remote