DevOps / Platform Engineering Lead (Hands-On, Hybrid Infra)

Wise Wolves Corporation run a hybrid stack across cloud and on-prem: Kubernetes, containers, and a handful of performance-critical services on bare metal. We’re looking for a hands-on DevOps/Platform Lead to own the developer platform and deployment experience—building scalable, reliable, and automated infrastructure that accelerates product teams.

Responsibilities: 

● Lead & grow the team: Coach 3–5 DevOps/Platform engineers; set standards, run 1:1s, drive roadmaps and delivery.

● Own the platform: Design, operate, and evolve Kubernetes-based environments (multi-cluster, multi-region) across cloud + on-prem.

● IaC & GitOps: Standardize with Terraform/Helm and GitOps (Argo CD/Flux). Create reusable modules, blueprints, and golden paths.

● CI/CD at scale: Build fast, reliable pipelines (Build/Test/Deploy), artifact registries, environment promotions, and preview environments.

● Observability: Ensure first-class monitoring, logging, and tracing (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK/OTel); tighten feedback loops for engineers.

● Networking for hybrid: Own service connectivity—ingress, LBs, CNI, east-west traffic, API gateways, and secure cloud↔on-prem peering.

● Stateful & storage: Operate CSI-backed storage, object/block integrations, and tune performance for stateful workloads where needed.

● Performance & scalability: Capacity planning, autoscaling strategies (HPA/VPA/KEDA), rollout strategies (blue/green, canary).

● Developer experience: Ship internal self-service (IDP) portals, templates, and CLIs so teams can provision infra safely and quickly.

● Tooling & modernization: Evaluate and introduce tools that improve reliability, speed, or cost—measure impact and adopt pragmatically.

Must-have experience: 

● 7–10 years in DevOps/Platform/SRE roles

● Deep hands-on with Kubernetes (cluster lifecycle, upgrades, multi-cluster patterns) and containers.

● Strong IaC (Terraform) and Helm; production GitOps workflows (Argo CD/Flux).

● Cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) plus real exposure to on-prem/bare metal or virtualization (KVM/Proxmox/VMware).

● Solid networking fundamentals (VPCs/VNETs, VPNs/peering, DNS, L4/L7 load balancing, ingress).

● CI/CD design and operation (GitLab CI/GitHub Actions/Jenkins or similar); caching, parallelization, test orchestration.

● Observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry) and performance troubleshooting.

● Proficient in automation/scripting (Python or Go preferred; Bash a given). Git-centric workflows.

Nice to have: 

● Experience with cursor or similar AI tools.

● 2+ years leading a small engineering team.

● Multi-cluster management (Cluster API, Rancher, GKE Autopilot/EKS blueprints).

● Service mesh experience (Istio/Linkerd) and traffic management for canary/blue-green.

● Cost awareness for infra (right-sizing, autoscaling, spot/RI/Savings Plans).

● Supply-chain hardening knowledge (SBOMs, provenance) from a platform perspective.

● Experience building an Internal Developer Platform (Backstage/Port or homegrown).

Soft skills: 

● Pragmatic leadership: balances vision with hands-on delivery.

● Excellent communicator with product/dev teams.

● Bias for automation, simplification, and measurable outcomes