Principal Software Engineer, DevOps

ABOUT SLATE

At Slate, we’re building safe, reliable vehicles that people can afford, personalize and love—and doing it here in the USA as part of our commitment to reindustrialization. The spirit of DIY and customization runs throughout every element of a Slate, because people should have control over how their trucks look, feel, and represent them.

About Slate Auto

Slate Auto is a new American electric vehicle company building something the industry hasn’t seen: a purpose-built, affordable EV truck designed for real people. We’re in pre-production and moving fast — which means every hire shapes the culture and product we’re building.

Our digital experiences — from the moment someone discovers a Slate truck online to the day they configure, purchase, and drive one — are as important to us as the vehicle itself. We’re building our consumer website, ecommerce platform, ownership app, B2B partner integrations, and supporting APIs from the ground up, running on modern AWS infrastructure. We need a principal-level engineer who can lead the charge on making all of it reliable, observable, secure, and ready to scale.

Who We’re Looking For

Slate is looking for a Principal Software Engineer, DevOps to own the infrastructure strategy, developer platform, and operational excellence that power our consumer, internal, and B2B digital products. This is a hands-on technical leadership role — not a manager track. You’ll set direction, make architectural decisions, write and review code, and raise the bar for how we build and ship software across the organization.

The ideal candidate thrives at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, developer experience, and security — and is equally comfortable in an architecture review and a terminal window.

What You’ll Do

AWS Infrastructure & Strategy

• Own the architecture, design, and long-term strategy for Slate’s AWS environments, spanning consumer-facing applications, internal tools, and B2B partner integrations.

• Define and enforce cloud infrastructure standards, including multi-account strategy, VPC design, IAM governance, and cost management.

• Lead AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews across all workloads; identify risk areas and drive remediation roadmaps.

• Evaluate and adopt managed AWS services (e.g., ECS/EKS, RDS, Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront) to reduce operational overhead and improve resilience.

• Partner with engineering teams to right-size infrastructure, optimize spend, and build toward a scalable, production-grade architecture as Slate grows from startup to scale.

SDLC Patterns & Developer Platform

• Define and champion SDLC standards across our Next.js/Vercel consumer web platform, internal applications, and API services — covering branching strategy, code review, CI/CD pipelines, environment promotion, and release management.

• Build and operate CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or equivalent) that enable fast, safe deployments across consumer, internal, and B2B surfaces.

• Drive adoption of infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CDK) to ensure environments are reproducible, auditable, and drift-free.

• Champion developer experience: reduce toil, improve local dev parity with production, and create self-service tooling so engineers ship with confidence.

• Establish and document engineering runbooks, deployment playbooks, and incident response procedures.

Observability & Reliability

• Lead the design and implementation of Slate’s observability strategy: centralized logging, distributed tracing, and metrics across all application tiers.

• Select and standardize observability tooling (e.g., Datadog, OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch, Grafana) and ensure consistent instrumentation across services.

• Define SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for critical customer-facing flows — checkout, vehicle configuration, API uptime — and build alerting to support them.

• Establish Sev1/Sev2 incident response processes, including on-call rotation design, runbooks, post-mortem culture, and MTTA/MTTR tracking.

• Proactively identify reliability risks and drive chaos engineering or game-day exercises to validate system resilience.

Security & Compliance

• Own cloud security posture across AWS environments: implement guardrails using SCPs, Config Rules, Security Hub, and IAM least-privilege policies.

• Lead application security practices including SAST/DAST integration in CI pipelines, secrets management (e.g., AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault), and dependency vulnerability scanning.

• Collaborate with enterprise IT and legal/compliance on data privacy requirements relevant to our consumer ecommerce and ownership platform (e.g., PCI-DSS scoping, CCPA).

• Drive periodic penetration testing, threat modeling, and remediation prioritization across consumer and internal systems.

• Evaluate and adopt security tooling (e.g., Prowler, Wiz, Snyk) to maintain continuous visibility into risk exposure.

Technical Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Serve as the technical authority for DevOps and infrastructure decisions; influence architecture across the full digital stack.

• Mentor and upskill engineers on infrastructure, DevOps practices, and cloud-native patterns without requiring them to become specialists.

• Partner closely with the Head of Digital, software engineering leads, enterprise IT, and infosec to align infrastructure decisions with business and product priorities.

• Represent infrastructure and platform concerns in product planning, sprint reviews, and roadmap discussions.

• Contribute to engineering hiring: technical screens, interview design, and onboarding for DevOps and backend hires.

What You Bring

Required

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 5 years focused on cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or DevOps in a production environment.

• Deep, hands-on AWS expertise across core services (EC2, ECS/EKS, RDS/Aurora, Lambda, CloudFront, Route 53, IAM, VPC, S3, SQS/SNS, API Gateway, and more).

• Demonstrated experience conducting or leading AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews and driving remediation.

• Strong infrastructure-as-code proficiency: Terraform and/or AWS CDK in production environments.

• Proven track record designing and operating CI/CD pipelines for web applications and APIs (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or equivalent).

• Solid application security experience: SAST/DAST, secrets management, IAM hardening, and vulnerability remediation workflows.

• Experience building and improving observability stacks (structured logging, distributed tracing, dashboards, alerting) for production web systems.

• Proficiency in at least one backend language used in web/API contexts (Node.js/TypeScript strongly preferred; Python also valued).

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to translate complex infrastructure topics for non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience working in fast-moving startup or scale-up environments where you’ve had to make pragmatic tradeoffs under ambiguity.

Preferred

• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional, or Security Specialty).

• Experience with Vercel or similar edge/CDN-first deployment platforms alongside AWS-hosted backends.

• Familiarity with ecommerce or consumer-facing web platforms at scale (high-traffic, transactional systems).

• Experience in automotive, consumer electronics, or other hardware-adjacent industries.

• Exposure to PCI-DSS scoping or CCPA/privacy-by-design in a consumer product context.

• Experience with AI-assisted developer tooling and incorporating it into engineering workflows.

• Background working with external API integrations and B2B partner connectivity (OAuth, webhooks, API gateway patterns).

Why Join Team Slate

We’re fueled by grit, determination, and attention to detail. Slate’s startup spirit of ingenuity and resourcefulness drives us forward, while our shared principles keep us aligned:

• Safety First

• Delight Customers

• One Team

• Relentless Improvement

• Fast, Frugal, and Scrappy

• Respectful Collaboration

• Positive Legacy

This is a rare opportunity to own infrastructure and DevOps practice from the ground up at a company that’s building something genuinely new — and where your work will be felt by customers from day one.

Our Commitment to Inclusion

Slate is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We are committed to building a workplace that reflects the diversity of the communities we serve and where everyone feels welcome.

We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, parental status, cultural background, work style, tenure, or any other legally protected status.

Slate is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with

disabilities throughout the application process. If you need assistance or accommodation, please contact recar-talent_acquisition@slate.auto.

WHY JOIN TEAM SLATE?

At Slate, we’re fueled by grit, determination, and attention to detail. The start-up spirit of ingenuity and resourcefulness move our business forward. Team Slate fosters a culture of excellence, innovation, and mutual respect, and is motivated by shared principles.

• Safety First

• Delight Customers

• One Team

• Relentless Improvement

• Fast, Frugal, and Scrappy

• Respectful Collaboration

• Positive Legacy

WE WANT TO WORK WITH PEOPLE THAT REFLECT THE COMMUNITIES IN WHICH WE OPERATE.

Slate is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, marital status, parental status, cultural background, organizational level, work styles, tenure and life experiences. Or for any other reason.

Slate is committed to providing reasonable accommodation for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at

slate-talent_acquisition@slate.auto.