DevOps Tech Lead Manager

Job description

# **About the role** Aplazo’s mission is to empower financial access, opportunity, and freedom by connecting people and businesses in Latin America through fair, simple, and transparent financial solutions. We are looking for a DevOps Tech Lead Manager to lead our DevOps squad — the team that keeps Aplazo’s core infrastructure reliable, scalable, and secure. This is a first-line people management role: you will own the squad’s delivery, quality, and on-call, while staying hands-on as an engineer 40–60% of your time. You are as comfortable running a 1:1 or writing a performance review as you are debugging a production incident or reviewing a Terraform change. You are the person your squad trusts to remove blockers, tell them the truth (good or bad), and connect their day-to-day work to why it matters for Aplazo’s business. # **What you’ll work on** - Managing and growing a squad of 4–8 DevOps engineers (E1 through E3) - Owning your squad’s delivery commitments, code/infra quality, and on-call rotation - Staying hands-on with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and observability work alongside your team - Running 1:1s, writing performance reviews, and coaching career growth for your reports - Hiring and onboarding new engineers into the squad - Owning squad-level incidents and post-mortems, escalating proactively when needed - Tying the squad’s work to business OKRs/KPIs and representing the squad in planning and cross-team syncs # **Key responsibilities** ## **People & Team Development** - Hire and onboard engineers through E3; run regular 1:1s and write performance reviews - Coach career growth for each report, with concrete development plans - Build psychological safety and ownership in the squad so problems surface early, not in production - Stay technically sharp enough to earn the squad’s trust as an engineer, not just a manager - Act as a Culture & Values champion for the squad ## **Get Stuff Done** - Ensure the squad delivers on its commitments at a predictable velocity and measurable quality - Own squad-level incidents and postmortems; escalate proactively rather than let issues fester - Remove process, tooling, and tech-debt blockers instead of just escalating them - Stay hands-on (40–60%) with IaC, CI/CD pipelines, observability (Datadog), and cloud cost optimization ## **Business Impact** - Keep the squad’s work clearly tied to business OKRs and/or KPIs - Proactively propose business value (OKRs/KPIs) — be a protagonist, not just an executor - Give the squad a sense of purpose; explain why the work matters to the business - Identify trade-offs that balance delivery speed against regulatory constraints (CNBV, Condusef, etc.) ## **Communication & Leadership** - Communicate clearly and kindly with reports, peers, and your own leader — including surfacing bad news early - Communicate risk and trade-offs clearly and as publicly as possible to all stakeholders - Represent the squad in planning, grooming, and cross-team syncs, recognizing individual contributions - Know when to ask for help and when to escalate - Give feedback that helps people improve, not feedback that just gets delivered - Translate external and business pressure into clear priorities the squad can act on # **What we’re looking for** ## **Required experience** - 3+ years in DevOps, Platform, or Infrastructure Engineering with production ownership - Prior experience leading a team formally (as a manager) or informally (as a tech lead) — hiring, mentoring, or running incident response for others - Track record of owning delivery for a team, not just individual tickets - Comfort operating as a working manager: 40–60% hands-on IC work alongside people management ## **Technical skills** - Strong expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation) - Deep knowledge of CI/CD systems and modern delivery practices (trunk-based development, feature flags, incremental rollouts) - Hands-on experience with AWS (Fargate, ECS, EC2, RDS/Postgres, ElastiCache, Lambda, SQS, Kinesis) - Proficiency with observability tools – metrics, logs, traces, alerting (Datadog preferred) - Comfortable with scripting/automation in Python, Bash, or Node.js/TypeScript - Solid understanding of cloud security practices, secret management, and compliance requirements ## **People & management skills** - Experience running 1:1s, giving structured feedback, and writing performance reviews - Ability to hire and onboard engineers, and to coach career growth across levels (E1–E3) - Builds psychological safety — team members raise problems early rather than hide them - Comfortable making people decisions (hiring, performance, growth plans) with fairness and empathy ## **Soft skills** - Strong communicator: direct, clear, and comfortable surfacing bad news to reports, peers, and leadership — in Spanish, with working English for vendor/partner interactions - Manages ambiguity well: adjusts to changing priorities, makes conscious trade-offs, and proposes best practices from scratch when needed - Favors people over rigid process (Agile mindset) but takes workflow hygiene seriously (well-defined stories, estimation, clean PRs) - Growth mindset: seeks feedback, mentors others, and continuously improves own craft # **Nice to have** - Familiarity with GCP services (BigQuery, Pub/Sub) - Experience with MongoDB Atlas or other managed data stores - Exposure to fintech, payments, or regulated environments (CNBV, SOC 2, PCI) - Experience creating or improving on-call and incident response processes - Prior formal people-management experience (title of Manager, EM, or Team Lead) - Knowledge of DORA metrics and using them to drive team improvement # **What success looks like** - Your squad delivers on its commitments at a predictable, measurable velocity and quality - Incidents are owned end-to-end — proactive escalation, thorough post-mortems, and fewer repeat issues - Your reports grow faster because of your coaching, 1:1s, and honest feedback - The squad’s work is visibly tied to business OKRs/KPIs, and stakeholders trust your read on trade-offs - Problems surface early because your squad feels safe raising them # **Why join us** - Lead a squad building the infrastructure that powers financial inclusion across Latin America - Stay hands-on as an engineer while growing your people-leadership craft - Work in a high-growth fintech at the intersection of infrastructure, delivery, and real business impact - A team with deep roots in product, technology, and culture-focused companies.