Lead DevOps Engineer

Full-time Employment: Ability to work as a full-time employee

Location: Austin, TX (Hybrid)

About Us:

Valkyrie is an applied science firm that builds industry-defining custom AI, ML and Knowledge Engineering solutions. Our interdisciplinary applied science teams support our clients from data normalization all the way through model deployment. Our work can be found across industry from SiriusXM, Activision, Chubb Insurance, and the Department of Defense, to name a few.

Valkyrie is developing an internal product, leveraging best-in-class AI technology. This position will help spearhead the product development. This is a early stage launch and will require someone who is ambitious, takes initiative and thrives in building a DevOps practice from the ground up. Experience at an early-stage company is a plus.

Lead DevOps Engineer Position:

We're hiring our first DevOps Engineer to architect and own our production infrastructure from the ground up, including designing and implementing production-grade Kubernetes clusters on AWS for our multi-tenant SaaS platform serving customers in highly regulated industries (finance, defense, others). This is a unique opportunity to be a part of foundational decisions that will shape our platform for years to come. You'll design and implement secure, compliant, scalable infrastructure on AWS while building the DevOps culture and practices for our growing engineering team. This role involves architecting secure AWS Organizations structure with multi-account strategy, implementing VPC architectures with proper network isolation, and managing IaC across multiple AWS accounts. You'll build security-first infrastructure meeting SOC 2, HIPAA, NIST 800-53, and government compliance requirements, while owning the observability stack and managing complex distributed systems including PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Neo4j, and Temporal workflow orchestration.

Lead DevOps Engineer Qualifications:

We encourage candidates to apply even if they don’t have 100% of the below qualifications. We believe in a holistic approach when evaluating talent for our team and post new roles often, so even if this role isn’t quite right, we want to meet you!

• Bachelor’s degree in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) or or equivalent work experience
• 5+ years of production experience running Kubernetes on AWS (EKS strongly preferred)
• 5+ years of experience managing production database instances (managed and self-hosted)
• 5+ years of experience with AWS Organizations, multi-account strategy, SCPs, and cross-account IAM patterns
• 5+ years of expertise designing secure VPC architectures (CIDR planning, subnet strategies, routing, VPC peering/Transit Gateway, PrivateLink)
• 3+ years of experience with multi-tenant SaaS architectures and isolation patterns (network, IAM, data)
• 3+ years of track record implementing compliance frameworks (SOC 2, HIPAA, FedRAMP, or similar)
• 5+ years of expertise with IaC (Terraform preferred, open to other tools)
• 5+ years of strong security mindset including encryption key management, Zero Trust networking, service mesh
• 3+ years of experience operating high-availability PostgreSQL and distributed databases in production with monitoring and troubleshooting (managed DB services as well)
• Proven ability to own infrastructure decisions and work autonomously
• Experience with Agile team methodologies including daily stand-ups
• Strong experience in effective technical communication and problem-solving within multidisciplinary teams
• Comfortable working autonomously with high ownership and accountability in making infrastructure decisions that impact enterprise customers in regulated industries

Like-to-have Qualifications:

• Deep understanding of GitHub Actions and build pipelines in AWS
• Experience with Temporal or Airflow workflow orchestration platforms
• Graph database experience (Neo4j, Memgraph)
• Search database experience (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch)
• Vector database experience (Qdrant, Milvus)
• AWS RDS Proxy and PostgreSQL performance tuning expertise
• FIPS 140-2 compliance implementation experience
• Experience with modern reverse proxies (Caddy or similar)
• Contributions to open-source DevOps tooling
• Experience with observability stacks (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Prometheus, Grafana)
• Experience with secrets management solutions (Infisical, Vault, AWS Secrets Manager)

Perks:

• Tremendous growth potential
• Open and unlimited PTO & Sick time
• Flexible hours, work from home as needed
• Medical, dental, vision, & HSA options
• 401K
• Parking Included
• Onsite gym & showers
• Stocked kitchen with healthy snacks, drinks, coffee, etc
• Team events including happy hours, catered lunches, and other fun outings
• Innovative, collaborative, and fun work environment that fosters a positive and supportive culture for growth

Full-time Employment: Ability to work as a full-time employee

The pay range for this role is:
140,000 - 190,000 USD per year(Austin)