The Role

We are building a reliability-critical API platform with external partners and contractual SLA requirements.

This role is focused on platform ownership: AWS cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, secure-by-default infrastructure practices, business continuity and operational foundations that allow the engineering team and product to scale safely.

As a Senior DevOps Engineer, your role is to strengthen the platform foundation, reliability improvements, support and improve observability together with the team, and help developers ship features safely and with confidence. 

This is not a support role. Success in this position means actively driving infrastructure improvements, reducing operational risk and enabling developers to ship and operate services without relying on DevOps for routine work.

What You’ll Do

Platform & Infrastructure

• Maintain and improve our AWS and Kubernetes environments, CI/CD pipelines and IaC (Gitlab CI, Terraform, Helm, Werf)
• Ensure infrastructure is stable, up-to-date and operationally sound including Kubernetes and other core components’ upgrades
• Improve reliability of critical infrastructure components: CI runners, Vault, networking, etc.
• Reduce single points of failure and overall operational fragility 
• Maintain clear and up-to-date documentation of infrastructure architecture, operational decisions and recovery procedures to reduce knowledge silos and bus factor

CI/CD & SDLC

• Design and maintain scalable CI/CD workflows for backend services including monorepository and multi-repository setups
• Own CI/CD architecture and pipelines (GitLab CI)
• Ensure pipelines are stable, fast, debuggable and safe to operate
• Maintain deployment processes, including rollback mechanisms and basic deployment verification
• Support multi- and monorepository workflows from a CI/CD perspective

Security & Compliance Foundations

• Maintain secure-by-default infrastructure practices
• Implement and maintain security checks in CI/CD, i.e. SAST, later DAST where applicable
• Support implementation of IT&Security policies from an execution perspective
• Follow and apply security practices (IAM, least privilege, secret handling).

Business Continuity & Reliability Foundations

• Own backup and restore mechanisms and regularly verify that recovery works
• Help defining and own maintenance of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity practices
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response
• Help reduce operational risk for reliability-critical services

Enablement & Developer Experience

• Remove the need to involve DevOps in routine operational tasks. Enable self-service for developers (services and repositories bootstrap)
• Work closely with backend engineers to improve delivery and operational workflows
• Actively surface operational and reliability risks during product and architecture discussions
• Document infrastructure decisions and help the team understand how to run services safely

Reliability Awareness (secondary focus)

• Understand and support observability requirements (metrics, dashboards, alerting).
• Be aware of SLI/SLO concepts and how infrastructure decisions impact them.
• Collaborate with the team on incident analysis and improvements to prevent repeating incidents

Required Experience & Skills

• 5+ years of professional DevOps / SRE experience
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures
• Practical understanding of infrastructure and application security basics (IAM, secret handling, least privilege, security hardening)
• Solid experience with Terraform, Helm and infrastructure-as-code workflows
• Experience with implementing observability practices (metrics, alerting, dashboards, SLI/SLO) and understanding of observability tools (Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, Loki, Alertmanager). 
• Deep understanding of CI/CD systems and pipeline design (GitLab CI preferred).
• Experience working with secret management solutions (Vault or similar)
• Ability to work closely with developers and explain operational concepts clearly
• Ability to take ownership of complex systems and drive improvements independently
• Comfortable participating in on-call rotations and investigating incidents
• Understanding how multi-regional or highly available infrastructure is built
• English level B2+, written and spoken

Nice to Have

• Experience working on reliability-critical, compliance-oriented environments and/or SLA-driven systems, i.e. fintech, crypto, payments
• Experience supporting or designing monorepository CI/CD workflows
• Experience integrating CI/CD security checks such as SAST/DAST
• Experience improving developer self-service and internal tooling
• Experience driving technical improvements across teams
• Experience in building multi-region or high-availability infrastructure

Soft Skills We Value

• Strong sense of ownership and accountability
• Willingness to challenge existing setups when they introduce operational risk
• Communication is a key: ability to explain infrastructure and operational topics clearly to developers
• Pragmatic approach to problem solving, without overengineering
• Comfort working in an environment where requirements evolve over time

Reporting Structure

Reports to the Director of Engineering. 

Works closely with software engineers and technical leaders.

This role does not include direct people management.

Compensation & Benefits

We believe great engineering requires a supportive environment:

• Competitive compensation
• Equity and performance-based bonuses, depending on role and contribution
• Paid time off
• Learning and growth opportunities
• Remote-first work setup
• Strong engineering culture focused on quality and reliability
• Yearly company offsites
• Company-provided equipment (laptop and necessary hardware)

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About Cyclops

Cyclops is the only crypto and stablecoin infrastructure provider exclusively focused on payments. Historically, crypto and stablecoin payments have been unnecessarily difficult. With Cyclops, the era of delays and complexity is over.

We are serial entrepreneurs. We founded The Giving Block in 2018, sold it to Shift4 (NYSE: FOUR) in 2022, then spent the last 4 years building out the Shift4 crypto team and products. Now, we’re running things back and following a similar playbook. This time we’re more prepared and backed by the best in the industry (Castle Island, Fidelity, and Shift4).

Cyclops Culture

Don’t join Cyclops if you’re looking for a typical 9-5. The culture we’ve built is one of first-principles thinking and relentless execution. We wake up every day excited to deliver great products worthy of the world’s best companies. Everyone who works at Cyclops must have a founder mindset, where no problem is too big to solve.