Sr Devops Engineer

Branch Overview

Branch delivers world-class financial services to the mobile generation. With offices in the United States, Nigeria, Kenya, and India, Branch is a for-profit socially conscious company that uses the power of data science to reduce the cost of delivering financial services in emerging markets. We believe that everyone everywhere deserves fair financial access. The rapid spread of smartphones presents an opportunity for the world’s emerging middle class to access banking options and achieve financial flexibility. 

Branch’s mission-driven team is led by the founder and former CEO of Kiva.org. The company presents a rich opportunity for our team members to drive meaningful growth in rapidly evolving and changing markets. In 2019, Branch announced its Series C and has garnered more than $100M in funding with investments from leading Silicon Valley firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Trinity Capital, Foundation Capital, Visa, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

We value diversity and are committed to providing an inclusive working environment where human beings of all backgrounds can thrive. 

Job Overview

Branch is seeking a seasoned DevOps Engineer to own parts of our cloud infrastructure and DevOps operations. In this role, you will lead by example, and design, deploy, and optimize our AWS-based infrastructure, ensuring seamless orchestration of workloads across Kubernetes and serverless environments like AWS Lambda.

You will play a pivotal role in automating processes, enhancing system reliability, and driving the adoption of DevOps best practices. Collaborating closely with our Engineering, Product, and Data teams, you’ll contribute to scaling our infrastructure and supporting our rapid growth. This position offers a unique opportunity to refine your technical expertise in a dynamic and fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive the architecture, design, and scaling of various parts of our cloud infrastructure on AWS, ensuring security, resilience, and cost efficiency
• Optimize Kubernetes clusters, including advanced scheduling, networking, and security enhancements to support mission-critical workloads
• Architect and improve CI/CD pipelines, incorporating automation, canary deployments, and rollback strategies for seamless releases
• Design and implement monitoring, logging, and observability solutions to ensure proactive issue detection and system performance tuning at scale
• Establish and enforce security best practices, including IAM governance, secret management, and compliance frameworks
• Be the go-to expert for multiple infrastructure components, providing technical leadership and driving improvements across interconnected systems
• Lead large-scale projects spanning multiple quarters, defining roadmaps, tracking progress, and ensuring timely execution with minimal supervision
• Drive collaboration with cross-functional teams, including ML, Data, and Product, to align infrastructure solutions with business and engineering goals
• Mentor and support junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, technical excellence, and best practices
• Set and refine DevOps standards, driving automation, scalability, and system reliability across the organization

Qualifications

• A minimum of 7 years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or a similar role, with expertise in designing and managing large-scale cloud infrastructure
• Experience working on software product development, with proficiency in a mainstream stack.
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS services such as EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, ECS, EKS, and VPC networking
• Advanced proficiency in Terraform for infrastructure as code, including best practices for scaling and managing cloud resources
• Strong expertise in Kubernetes, including cluster provisioning, networking, security hardening, and performance optimization
• Proficiency in scripting and automation using Python, Bash, or Go, with experience integrating APIs and optimizing workflows
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools like CircleCI, Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, or ArgoCD
• Strong knowledge of monitoring, logging, and observability tools such as DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana, and AWS CloudWatch
• Deep understanding of cloud security, IAM governance, role-based access control (RBAC), and compliance frameworks like SOC2 or ISO 27001
• Proven ability to lead and mentor junior engineers while fostering a collaborative and high-performance team culture
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across cultures, functions, and time zones in a globally distributed team

Benefits of Joining

• Be part of a mission-driven, fast-paced, and entrepreneurial environment that fosters innovation and impact
• Receive a competitive salary and equity package, reflecting your value and contributions
• Thrive in a collaborative and flat company culture that encourages open communication and idea-sharing
• Enjoy the flexibility of a remote-first work setup, with opportunities for occasional in-person collaboration
• Benefit from fully-paid Health Insurance to support your well-being
• Work-life balance is not a myth. Take advantage of paid time off, including personal leave, bereavement leave, and sick leave
• Access fully paid parental leave, with 6 months of maternity leave and 3 months of paternity leave
• Leverage annual professional development budget to upskill and advance your career
• Participate in discretionary trips to our offices around the globe, supported by global travel medical insurance
• Enjoy team meals and social events, both virtual and in-person, to connect and bond with colleagues

1. Design cloud infrastructure that is secure, scalable, and highly available on AWS, Azure and GCP
2. Work collaboratively with software engineering to define infrastructure and deployment requirements
3. Provision, configure and maintain AWS, Azure, GCP cloud infrastructure defined as code
4. Ensure configuration and compliance with configuration management tools
5. Administer and troubleshoot Linux based systems
6. Troubleshoot problems across a wide array of services and functional areas
7. Build and maintain operational tools for deployment, monitoring, and analysis of AWS, Azure Infrastructure and systems
8. Perform infrastructure cost analysis and optimization

• Proficient in Linux Commands line and troubleshooting.
• Proficient in AWS Services. Deployment, Monitoring and troubleshooting applications in AWS.
• Hands-on experience with CI tooling preferably with Jenkins.
• Proficient in deployment using Ansible.
• Knowledge of infrastructure management tools (Infrastructure as cloud) such as terraform, AWS cloudformation etc.
• Proficient in deployment of applications behind load balancers and proxy servers such as nginx, apache.
• Scripting languages: Bash, Python, Groovy.
• Experience with Logging, Monitoring, and Alerting tools like ELK(Elastic-search, Logstash, Kibana), Nagios. Graylog, splunk Prometheus, Grafana is a plus.

JD for Devops

Experience: 5+ years

• Cloud and virtualization-based technologies (Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMWare).
• Java Application Server Administration (Weblogic, WidlFfy, JBoss, Tomcat).
• Docker and Kubernetes (EKS)
• Linux/UNIX Administration (Amazon Linux and RedHat).
• Developing and supporting cloud infrastructure designs and implementations and guiding application development teams.
• Configuration Management tools (Chef or Puppet or ansible).
• Log aggregations tools such as Elastic and/or Splunk.
• Automate infrastructure and application deployment-related tasks using terraform.
• Automate repetitive tasks required to maintain a secure and up-to-date operational environment.

Responsibilities

• Build and support always-available private/public cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Build AWS or other public cloud infrastructure using Terraform.
• Deploy and manage Kubernetes (EKS) based docker applications in AWS.
• Create custom OS images using Packer.
• Create and revise infrastructure and architectural designs and implementation plans and guide the implementation with operations.
• Liaison between application development, infrastructure support, and tools (IT Services) teams.
• Development and documentation of Chef recipes and/or ansible scripts. Support throughout the entire deployment lifecycle (development, quality assurance, and production).
• Help developers leverage infrastructure, application, and cloud platform features and functionality participate in code and design reviews, and support developers by building CI/CD pipelines using Bamboo, Jenkins, or Spinnaker.
• Create knowledge-sharing presentations and documentation to help developers and operations teams understand and leverage the system's capabilities.
• Learn on the job and explore new technologies with little supervision.
• Leverage scripting (BASH, Perl, Ruby, Python) to build required automation and tools on an ad-hoc basis.

Who we have in mind:

• Solid experience in building a solution on AWS or other public cloud services using Terraform.
• Excellent problem-solving skills with a desire to take on responsibility.
• Extensive knowledge in containerized application and deployment in Kubernetes
• Extensive knowledge of the Linux operating system, RHEL preferred.
• Proficiency with shell scripting.
• Experience with Java application servers.
• Experience with GiT and Subversion.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate technical issues to non-technical and technical audiences.
• Experience working in a large-scale operational environment.
• Internet and operating system security fundamentals.
• Extensive knowledge of massively scalable systems. Linux operating system/application development desirable.
• Programming in scripting languages such as Python. Other object-oriented languages (C++, Java) are a plus.
• Experience with Configuration Management Automation tools (chef or puppet).
• Experience with virtualization, preferably on multiple hypervisors.
• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Excellent written and verbal skills.

Education or Equivalent Experience:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent education in related fields
• Certificates of training in associated fields/equipment’s