Senior DevOps Engineer

About the Role

On a busy giving day, ten minutes of downtime can cost around $500k — we need the engineer who makes sure it doesn’t happen.

You’ll join the DevOps team that owns the platforms every engineering team relies on daily: CI/CD, observability, logging and developer tooling. This is a senior-only role. We’ll hand you an entire area — observability or CI/CD — and trust you to run it, from requirements and design through rollout, operations and mentoring others. You’ll be the go-to technical reference for that area and the senior escalation point when things get hard.

Key Responsibilities

• Own one of our core platform areas end-to-end: observability (VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Graylog / VictoriaLogs, fluent bit, exporters, alerting) or CI/CD (Jenkins scripted pipelines, Harbor, Nexus, build agents) — you drive its architecture, reliability, and roadmap.
• Drive technical initiatives end-to-end: gather requirements, write the design doc, decompose into tasks, implement, deliver to production, and own the operational health afterwards.
• Drive clarity in ambiguous situations by defining requirements, assumptions, and next steps.
• Design for reliability and scale: evolve the architecture of our platforms — topology, integration points, scaling approach, and reliability model.
• Support developers: deploy and monitor applications on both on-premise servers and Kubernetes (Helm), troubleshoot builds and deploys, help teams with metrics, alerts, and logs; participate in chat duty in developer support channels.
• Automate away toil: repetitive operations, provisioning, and maintenance should be codified, not performed by hand.
• Investigate production incidents as the senior escalation point for your area: drive resolution, lead post-mortems, implement systemic fixes. Participate in on-call rotations and raise the bar for how on-call works.
• Mentor less experienced engineers through design discussions, reviews, and pairing; catch debt-inducing shortcuts at the review stage.
• At Fundraise Up, AI is a default tool, not an experimental one. We expect every team member to actively use AI in their day-to-day work, identify where AI can change the shape of problems in their function, and grow their fluency as the tools evolve. In this role, that means using AI in all aspects of your work: researching, troubleshooting and developing.

Skills and Qualifications

• 6+ years as a DevOps Engineer / SRE (or very close responsibilities).
• Track record of owning technical initiatives end-to-end — from requirements and technical design through production delivery. You can showcase initiatives that were yours, not just tasks you completed.
• Confident Linux skills (we use Ubuntu).
• Working knowledge of the Prometheus stack: metric types, exporters, and how alerting works — enough to navigate and extend an existing setup.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD: pipeline design, build orchestration, artifact delivery.
• Containers: Docker, image building, registries.
• Ansible.
• Git.
• Experience with Bash or Python scripting for automation and observability (writing exporters, eliminating routine work).
• Production/on-call experience: diagnosing incidents, restoring service, leading post-mortems.
• Experience mentoring less experienced engineers.
• Ownership and attention to detail. Downtime is expensive: during busy events 10 minutes of downtime can cost us around $500k.
• Languages: Fluent Russian (required, as you’ll be working in a Russian-speaking team).

Must Have: two or more of these areas

We understand it’s impossible to be an expert in everything, but it’s important to have solid hands-on experience in two or more of the areas below:

• VictoriaMetrics / Prometheus stack at scale: architecture, cardinality control, exporters, alerting infrastructure.
• Log pipelines at scale: Graylog / VictoriaLogs / ELK — collection (fluent bit or similar), retention, sharding, performance.
• Jenkins scripted pipelines: shared libraries, pipeline infrastructure, build agent fleets.
• Container registries and artifact management: Harbor, Nexus, base images, image policies.
• Operating applications on Kubernetes: Helm, workload monitoring and log delivery, deploy troubleshooting.
• Grafana: dashboards as code, alerting, performance at scale.

Nice to Have

• Analytics & DS platforms: JupyterHub, Airflow, Tableau, MLflow, Airbyte — deployment, maintenance, resource limits. Building platform around these tools to improve Quality of Life for Analytics.
• Remote development environments and AI agent execution environments, e.g. Coder/Telepresence.
• Bare-metal Kubernetes: provisioning, networking, scaling.
• Flux and GitOps.
• Terraform.
• Sentry on-premise: operating self-hosted error tracking.
• ClickHouse, MongoDB.

You’ll Thrive Here If You…

• Want an area that’s truly yours, and the accountability that comes with it.
• Commit to your own estimates, and flag early when something is slipping instead of hoping it won’t.
• Ask for help at 2 a.m. rather than quietly going down the rabbit hole alone.
• Explain a complex incident in two minutes, not twenty.
• Disagree openly, make your case with data, then commit and move.
• Treat every manual step as a bug waiting to be automated.
• Get more satisfaction from making other engineers self-sufficient than from being the only one who knows how it works.
• Enjoy a fast-moving team that’s rebuilding how it works around AI, and stay curious as the tools change.

Gross Total Compensation 5600 - 5900 USD