DevOps Engineer

Location: Remote [United States]

Salary: $140-160k base + bonus & equity

Role Overview

We're hiring a DevOps Engineer to own and improve the infrastructure, deployment systems, and operational foundation that keep Clever reliable, secure, and resilient.

This role sits around the application code: infrastructure, deployments, observability, secrets, environments, incident readiness, security controls, and reliable paths for internal tools and services. The goal is simple: make Clever's infrastructure boring in the best possible way. High-risk releases should be observable and recoverable, production issues should be easier to detect and diagnose, and engineers should spend less time fighting environments, deployments, and one-off infrastructure decisions.

This is not a ticket-response operations role. We're looking for an engineer who can take ownership, identify recurring friction, prioritize the highest-leverage fixes, and drive improvements through to completion. The ideal candidate can reason about production systems, write code and automation, work near the backend application layer when needed, and partner across Engineering, Product, and Operations without slowing the company down.
Key Responsibilities

• Own and continuously improve the infrastructure and operational systems that support Clever's engineering teams
• Build safer deployment paths with automated health checks, documented rollback plans, and clear release visibility for high-risk services where the architecture supports them
• Improve production reliability across infrastructure, data stores, queues, background jobs, logs, alerts, and supporting services
• Lead or support infrastructure migrations, production cutovers, and environment changes across Heroku, AWS, ECS, RDS, networking, and DNS
• Strengthen observability and incident response through better alerts, dashboards, escalation paths, post-incident follow-up, runbooks, and operational drills
• Define practical reliability targets, service ownership expectations, and production-readiness standards for critical systems, internal tools, integrations, and AI-enabled workflows
• Partner with engineers on infrastructure-sensitive application work, including scaling, error handling, deployment risk, data access, rollback planning, and small backend or internal-tooling changes
• Support SOC2 and security readiness by improving infrastructure controls, access patterns, vulnerability handling, evidence collection, and repeatable operational practices
• Improve local development and staging environments so engineers can onboard, test, and validate changes with less friction

What Success Looks Like:

In 30 days... You understand Clever's core infrastructure, deployment paths, and operational risks, and you have shipped tangible improvements such as reducing noisy alerts, tightening a rollback path, improving staging/local development, documenting a high-risk runbook, or resolving a recurring infrastructure pain point.

In 6 months... Clever's most important infrastructure risks are no longer ownerless or invisible. Critical systems have clearer alerts, runbooks, escalation paths, and production-readiness expectations, and engineers have better paths for deployments, environments, internal tools, and safe AI-enabled workflows.

In 12 months... Clever's infrastructure is measurably more reliable and easier to operate. Deployments are safer, production issues are detected and resolved faster, repeated failure modes are less common, and the company has a stronger operational foundation for continued growth.
Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or backend engineering, including hands-on production infrastructure ownership
• Strong production experience with cloud infrastructure, especially AWS and services such as ECS, RDS, networking, IAM, DNS, and related operational patterns
• Experience operating or migrating production systems on Heroku, AWS, or similar platforms
• Deep understanding of CI/CD, deployment automation, rollback strategies, environment management, and release safety
• Strong observability and incident-response experience across logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerting, escalation, runbooks, and post-incident learning
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, repeatable infrastructure templates, scripting, and automation
• Comfortable reading backend application code and making well-scoped backend or internal-tooling changes when infrastructure and application behavior overlap
• Strong security and access-management judgment, including secrets management, environment controls, and least-privilege patterns
• Strong ownership mindset with a bias toward action, clear follow-through, and practical systems thinking
• Clear written communication and business judgment, especially for runbooks, technical decisions, operational standards, incident follow-up, and connecting infrastructure work to company impact

Nice to have experience with SOC2, security audits, Redis, background workers, queue systems, webhook delivery, Datadog, Sentry, GitHub Actions, Terraform, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Docker, Django/Python, TypeScript

You may not be a fit if you prefer a ticket-response operations role over shaping systems, standards, automation, and production-readiness practices; if you want mostly product feature work; if you are uncomfortable writing code, scripts, and internal tools; or if you do not enjoy making pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, reliability, security, cost, and operational simplicity.

What We Offer

Salary: $140-160k base + bonus & equity

Comprehensive Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance

Paid Time Off: 18 days of PTO (increases with tenure) plus 10 paid holidays

Professional Development: Annual budget for learning and career growth

Tenure Sabbaticals: Paid sabbaticals to celebrate major milestones

Clever Product Benefit: Exclusive access to Clever homeownership perks

🖥 Work-From-Home Stipend: Support for your remote workspace

401(k): Retirement plan administered through Guideline

Parental Leave: 6-12 weeks of paid parental leave

💙 Wellness Benefits: Free counseling sessions and optional weekly meditation