Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
About The Position
We're seeking a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer for a 3-month contract engagement to join our Infrastructure team and take ownership of operational excellence and SRE toil work. This is a remote, hands-on, high-velocity role where you'll keep the lights on and reduce operational burden from day one. This contract position exists to free up our existing team to focus on roadmap initiatives. By taking over day-to-day operational work and SRE toil, you'll enable one of our current engineers to tackle strategic projects. Your success means the platform runs smoothly while the team makes forward progress on critical initiatives. You'll bring deep operational expertise to manage production systems, respond to operational needs, and—critically—build systems and automation that reduce toil over time. This role is ideal for an experienced SRE or infrastructure engineer who thrives on operational work, can quickly understand production systems, and naturally improves everything they touch. Our platform powers genomics and laboratory workflows for customers in highly regulated environments. You'll work with modern infrastructure tooling (HashiCorp stack, AWS, Kubernetes patterns) while ensuring we meet the reliability, security, and compliance requirements our customers depend on.
Requirements
- 5-8 years of experience in infrastructure, platform, SRE, or DevOps engineering
- Strong operational background: Experience managing production systems and handling incidents
- Proven toil reduction skills: Track record of identifying repetitive work and automating it away
- Strong expertise with cloud infrastructure (AWS strongly preferred)
- Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform required)
- Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes, Nomad, or similar)
- Experience with service mesh and service discovery (Consul, Istio, or similar)
- Experience with secrets management (Vault, Secrets Manager, or similar)
- Strong understanding of monitoring, alerting, and observability
- Comfortable with on-call work: Experience with incident response and production support
- Proven ability to onboard quickly and become productive in new environments
- Strong troubleshooting skills: Can diagnose complex system issues under pressure
- Self-directed work style: Minimal supervision required for operational work
- Bias for automation: Natural instinct to eliminate manual work
Nice To Haves
- Experience with HashiCorp tooling (Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Vault)
- Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or other regulated industries
- Familiarity with compliance frameworks (HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC2, ISO 27001)
- Experience with observability platforms (Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus)
- Experience supporting Java/Spring applications
- Background in genomics, bioinformatics, or laboratory systems
- Experience with GitOps workflows and CI/CD automation
- Previous contract or consulting experience with rapid onboarding
- Experience quantifying and measuring toil (e.g., SLO/SLI frameworks)
Responsibilities
- Keep the lights on: Monitor, respond to, and resolve production incidents and operational issues
- Handle toil work: Manage routine operational tasks that currently consume team capacity (deployments, configuration changes, access management, maintenance windows)
- Participate in on-call rotation: Share responsibility for after-hours production support
- Respond to support escalations: Work with support and development teams to troubleshoot and resolve platform issues
- Manage production changes: Execute and validate infrastructure changes in production environments
- Maintain operational runbooks: Update and improve documentation for operational procedures
- Perform system maintenance: Handle patches, upgrades, certificate renewals, and other recurring operational tasks
- Ensure service reliability: Monitor system health, respond to alerts, and maintain SLAs
- Identify automation opportunities: Spot repetitive manual work and build automation to eliminate it
- Improve operational tooling: Create scripts, utilities, and self-service tools to reduce operational burden
- Enhance monitoring and alerting: Improve observability to catch issues before they become incidents
- Streamline deployment processes: Reduce friction and manual steps in release and deployment workflows
- Build self-service capabilities: Enable developers to handle routine tasks without infrastructure team involvement
- Implement infrastructure-as-code: Convert manual procedures into automated, repeatable infrastructure code (Terraform)
- Document systems improvements: Leave behind improved runbooks, automation, and processes
- Measure and track toil: Help quantify operational burden and demonstrate reduction over time
- Enable roadmap progress: By handling operational work, free up permanent team members for strategic initiatives
- Collaborate with development teams: Support their infrastructure needs and unblock their work
- Document tribal knowledge: Capture operational knowledge and procedures that exist only in people's heads
- Conduct handoffs: Provide clear documentation and knowledge transfer for systems and automation you build
- Participate in team rituals: Standups, retrospectives, and planning to stay aligned with team priorities
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
