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Instead · 1 day ago

Director of DevOps

San Francisco Bay Area

Full-time

Onsite

Lead/Staff, Director/Executive

3+ years exp

Instead is a tax platform designed to help taxpayers and tax professionals collaborate to save money on taxes and file tax returns. The Director of DevOps will own and manage the AWS infrastructure for a high-availability tax platform, ensuring secure and scalable cloud architectures while improving CI/CD pipelines and collaborating closely with engineering teams.

Apps

Hiring Manager

Amanda Argue, CPA

Responsibilities

Own and manage our AWS infrastructure across environments (staging, production, internal tools) for a high-availability tax platform

Design, implement, and maintain secure, scalable cloud architectures aligned with SOC 2 and other compliance requirements

Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code (primarily Terraform) for repeatable, auditable deployments

Implement and improve CI/CD pipelines to streamline build, test, and release processes for our engineering teams

Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve production issues across our services, networking, and data layers

Drive observability and reliability through logging, metrics, alerting, and incident response practices

Collaborate with engineering to design systems that are secure, cost-effective, and easy to operate in production

Take ownership of core infrastructure components (VPCs, IAM, networking, storage, containers, etc.) and continuously improve them

Qualification

AWS infrastructure managementTerraformCI/CD pipelinesLinux systemsContainerization (Docker)Security/compliance frameworksProgramming language (Python)KubernetesObservability stacksSecrets managementCommunication skills

Required

3+ years of hands-on experience managing production infrastructure in AWS

Strong experience with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code workflows

Solid understanding of AWS core services (EC2, RDS, ECS/EKS or similar, S3, IAM, networking, security groups, load balancers)

Experience operating and hardening Linux-based systems in production

Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and deploying containerized workloads

Experience working within security/compliance frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar)

Proven track record of owning systems end-to-end rather than isolated tasks

Ability to diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure and performance issues

Strong communication skills and comfort collaborating closely with engineers and leadership

Preferred

AWS certifications (e.g., Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, SysOps Administrator)

Experience with Kubernetes in production environments

Experience in at least one programming language (ideally Python) for tooling, automation, and integrations

Background supporting SaaS or fintech products with high security and uptime requirements

Experience setting up and tuning observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch)

Experience with secrets management, key management, and identity management at scale

Benefits

Own core infrastructure at a product-critical layer instead of being a ticket taker on a giant platform team

Work on a modern stack at the intersection of tax, fintech, and AI, where reliability and security really matter

Help shape DevOps/Platform practices, tooling, and standards from an early stage, with real influence on architecture decisions

Partner directly with experienced engineers, tax experts, and leadership

Join a well-funded company with strong industry investors and partners, building the first new IRS-approved e-file platform for major return types in decades

Grow your career in a role that blends cloud engineering, security, and reliability while shipping visible, meaningful work