Devops Engineer

Job description

# About PlayPower Labs PlayPower Labs builds software for leading EdTech companies that serve millions of learners. We help our clients solve hard product and engineering problems so they can deliver better learner experiences through advanced technology, thoughtful design, and reliable execution. We've been fully remote since before COVID and plan to stay remote. We are US-based, with a development center in Gandhinagar, India. # What We Believe - We believe technology is a force multiplier for education. - Great software can make learning more engaging, effective, personalized, and accessible for millions of learners worldwide. The future of education will be shaped by advanced online learning, AI, and education data, and we want to help build that future. - Education data combined with AI is opening up new ways to create adaptive, personalized learning experiences. We're here to turn those opportunities into real products that learners, educators, and EdTech companies can actually use. # The Role We're looking for a high-energy DevOps engineer who wants to own how real products ship and run, not just keep the lights on. You'll build and run the infrastructure behind products used by millions of students and teachers: AWS environments, CI/CD pipelines, containers, observability, and the security and automation that let a small team move fast and safely. Our platforms carry real load, real student data, and real deadlines. Back to school is a traffic event, not a metaphor. This role is for someone who can take a system from provisioning to production, secure it, monitor it, load test it, and keep it reliable without waiting to be told how. This role is open to candidates based in India (Indian residents only) and is fully remote. If you like automating everything, treating infrastructure as code, and using AI as a real engineering multiplier, you'll fit right in. # What You'll Do - Design, provision, and run cloud infrastructure across environments (dev, staging, production), and treat it as code: version it, review it, and automate provisioning end to end. - Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that make shipping fast, repeatable, and safe. - Containerize services and manage orchestration, scaling, and deployments. - Own cloud security: identity and least privilege, secrets and key rotation, network boundaries, TLS and WAF, and threat detection that actually gets triaged. - Keep the fleet current: base images, runtimes, and dependencies patched and rolled out automatically, so nothing drifts onto an end of life OS. - Harden the software supply chain: dependency and secret scanning, static analysis, private registries, and safe AI usage. - Own observability: logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting that catch issues early. - Build backup and disaster recovery you have actually tested, including cross region and cross account restores. - Run load and performance testing ahead of peak traffic, and turn the results into real scaling and capacity decisions. - Treat other engineers as your users: golden paths, templates, self-service tooling, and docs that let product teams provision safely without waiting on you. - Keep systems reliable: monitor uptime, respond to incidents, and reduce toil through automation. - Watch cloud spend and take the easy wins before they become hard ones. - Use AI tools, coding agents, MCPs, and automation to move faster. - Bring energy, ideas, and momentum to a small team building real product. # What We're Looking For - 2-5 years of hands-on DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering experience. - Strong with AWS across compute, networking, storage, and identity. Depth in GCP or Azure is welcome, but most of our work is AWS. - Solid with infrastructure as code (AWS CDK, Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or similar), and comfortable reviewing it like application code. - Comfortable with Docker and managed orchestration (ECS, Elastic Beanstalk, Kubernetes, or similar). - Experienced building CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, CodePipeline, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar). - Good scripting skills (Python, Bash, or similar) and genuinely comfortable operating on Linux. - Hands-on with observability and monitoring: metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting. - Real cloud security depth: IAM and least privilege, secrets management, credential rotation, network boundaries, and OWASP basics. - Willing to be on the hook for production: monitoring uptime, responding to incidents, and writing the automation that stops the same incident happening twice. - Fluent with modern AI dev tools and willing to keep experimenting as the tooling evolves. - Startup energy: ownership, speed, curiosity, and no "that's not my job" attitude. # Bonus Points - You've built or used MCP servers, agents, internal tools, or automations to speed up infra and delivery. - You've used AI to improve testing, monitoring, incident response, documentation, or dev velocity. - You've run load and performance tests at scale (JMeter, Gatling, k6, or Locust) and used the results to size infrastructure. - You've been through a compliance or audit cycle (SOC 2, student data privacy, penetration test remediation) and automated your way out of the spreadsheets. - You've actually restored from backup in a drill, not just configured one. - You've worked on platforms with a hard seasonal traffic peak. # What We Offer Remote work, competitive pay, real ownership, space to experiment, and a small team that cares about building good products without corporate theater.