What are the responsibilities and job description for the DevOps / Platform Engineer | AWS | Terraform | Elasticsearch | Fintech | Startup Exp Required position at Optimal?
DevOps / Platform Engineer | AWS | Terraform | Elasticsearch | Fintech | Startup Exp Required
Salary: $160,000 - $180,000 competitive equity
Contract: Permanent Start: ASAP
Working model: Hybrid - in Austin, TX
Eligibility: Open to candidates with existing US work authorisation - No sponsorship, including H-1Bs or transfers.
Required Tech Stack: AWS | Terraform | Ansible | Linux | Elasticsearch | Kafka | CI/CD | SOC 2
🚨 Please only apply if you have ALL of the following 🚨
- 4 years hands-on DevOps or SRE experience
- Deep AWS expertise in production environments
- Terraform and Linux proficiency — not just familiarity, ownership
- Experience supporting high-volume systems at scale
- Startup or scale-up experience (Non-Negotiable)
- Experience in regulated industries (fintech, healthcare, SOC 2, HIPAA)
- Strong written and spoken English — able to work US (CT/ET) hours
Role Overview
We're partnered exclusively with a fast-growing, investor-backed fintech platform that's scaling at an exceptional rate — operating in a brand new regulatory category and winning. Revenue growth has been extraordinary, the client pipeline outpaces engineering capacity, and they're now looking for a DevOps / Platform Engineer to provide critical redundancy and scale across their cloud infrastructure.
This isn't a ticket-queue role. You'll be partnering directly with an existing platform engineer to own the health, stability, and security of production systems processing enormous log volumes — and you'll be doing it in a high-trust, high-autonomy startup environment where your decisions move fast and your impact is immediate.
If you've scaled AWS infrastructure before, worked in regulated environments, and know what it feels like to own infra end-to-end — this is built for you.
What You'll Be Doing
- Monitor system health and manage EC2 capacity, disk, and memory — keeping production stable as traffic scales rapidly
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, and scripting
- Support the introduction of Kafka into production and harden the platform for continued expansion
- Perform security audits, manage alerting, investigate bad actors, and contribute to SOC 2 Level 2 compliance
- Triage production issues alongside the engineering team — root cause analysis and durable fixes across the AWS stack
- Work with AI services and tools integrated into the platform — comfort with AI tooling is expected
Nice to Have
- Prior experience in digital communications, payments, or debt collection tech
- Elasticsearch or similar log/observability platform experience
- Background as a founding or early platform engineer
- Experience hardening infrastructure for AI-powered services
Important Notes
- This is a hands-on infrastructure role — not suitable for cloud architects with no production ops experience
- You must be comfortable in a fast-paced startup with long feedback loops and high ownership
- Relocation assistance available (up to $10,000)
- Feedback on submissions within 24 hours — this is an urgent, active hire
If you've scaled AWS infrastructure in regulated environments and want to own the platform backbone of a genuine high-growth fintech — get in touch now for a fast response.
Salary : $160,000 - $180,000