What are the responsibilities and job description for the DevOps Engineer position at Kai?
Kai is the AI company rebuilding cybersecurity for the machine-speed era. Founded by second time founders and trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises, Kai is building a future where security has no categories, no silos, and no human speed bottlenecks. The Kai Agentic Platform replaces fragmented, human-limited workflows with agentic AI systems that continuously contextualize, assess, reason, and execute security work at the speed of thought - making human defenders, superhuman.
Why Kai?
Kai is seeking a highly skilled Senior DevOps Engineer to design, build, and maintain secure, scalable, and reliable infrastructure for our cybersecurity platform. This role bridges development, operations, and security — ensuring fast and secure delivery of software in a security-driven environment where your decisions directly impact the products protecting some of the world's largest enterprises.
You will play a key role in embedding security into the DevOps lifecycle (DevSecOps), improving system resilience, and supporting mission-critical applications.
What You'll Do
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
Why Kai?
- Well-funded: With $125M raised, we have the capital, runway, and resolve to rebuild cybersecurity from first principles.
- Proven: We've earned the trust of Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies, and we're just getting started. Their confidence in Kai reflects what we've built: an AI-powered cybersecurity platform that performs at the scale and speed the enterprise demands.
- Experienced founders: Our founding team consists of second-time entrepreneurs, each with over 20 years of experience in the cybersecurity industry. Their proven expertise and vision drive our ambitious goals.
- World-class leadership team: Our Heads of AI, Engineering, and Product bring extensive experience from some of the world’s most influential companies, ensuring top-tier mentorship, direction, and vision.
- Frontier AI Applied Research Team: Our researchers operate at the leading edge of agentic AI systems, translating breakthrough capabilities into real-world cybersecurity applications.
- Generous compensation: We offer highly competitive salaries, equity options, and a supportive work environment. Your contributions will be valued and rewarded as we grow together.
Kai is seeking a highly skilled Senior DevOps Engineer to design, build, and maintain secure, scalable, and reliable infrastructure for our cybersecurity platform. This role bridges development, operations, and security — ensuring fast and secure delivery of software in a security-driven environment where your decisions directly impact the products protecting some of the world's largest enterprises.
You will play a key role in embedding security into the DevOps lifecycle (DevSecOps), improving system resilience, and supporting mission-critical applications.
What You'll Do
- Design, implement, and manage cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP) with a focus on security and scalability
- Design and own network architecture — including environment segregation, service communication patterns, and infrastructure security design in partnership with the security team
- Automate infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, including GitOps-based continuous deployment using ArgoCD, to enable rapid and secure software delivery
- Own and optimize the observability stack — metrics, logs, and distributed tracing — as a highest-priority investment in system visibility, incident response, and reliability
- Collaborate with engineering and security teams to enforce DevSecOps best practices and embed security into every stage of the delivery lifecycle
- Work with the security team to balance deployment speed with security constraints across environments, solving the security-speed tension in POC and production deployments
- Collaborate closely with engineering teams to increase developer velocity — faster code pushes, cleaner CI/CD, and fewer deployment blockers
- Ensure systems meet security and compliance standards (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP)
- Integrate security tools (e.g., vulnerability scanning, secrets management) into pipelines
- Troubleshoot production issues and lead root-cause analysis for complex incidents
- Optimize system performance, reliability, and cost efficiency
- Mentor junior engineers and promote DevOps culture across teams
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
- 7 years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering
- Strong experience with:
- Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
- Containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions)
- GitOps and continuous deployment tooling — ArgoCD or equivalent
- Experience designing network architecture — environment segregation, service communication, and infrastructure security patterns
- Experience with infrastructure automation and configuration management
- Proficiency in scripting/programming (Python, Bash, or Go)
- Deep understanding of Linux systems and networking
- Experience implementing and optimizing monitoring, logging, and observability solutions, including distributed tracing
- Strong problem-solving skills in complex distributed systems — CI/CD pipeline optimization, system reliability, performance tuning, and cross-team collaboration
- Cloud security mindset — understanding of cloud security, compliance, and DevSecOps practices
- Experience in cybersecurity or DevSecOps environments
- Familiarity with zero-trust architecture and identity/access management
- Knowledge of compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, NIST, SOC 2)
- Experience with secrets management tools (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager)
- Background in incident response and security operations