Lead DevOps Engineer

About the role

Aplazo's mission is to empower financial access, opportunity, and freedom by connecting people and businesses in Latin America through fair, simple, and transparent financial solutions.

We are looking for a Lead DevOps Engineer to join our DevOps & SRE squad, the team that keeps Aplazo's core infrastructure reliable, scalable, and secure across ~150 microservices. This is a senior individual contributor role: you will own entire platform systems end-to-end, from CI/CD and infrastructure as code to observability and on-call tooling, and act as a technical leader for the squad. You are as comfortable leading a design review or mentoring a teammate as you are debugging a production incident or reviewing a Terraform change.

You are the engineer your squad trusts to set the technical bar, untangle the hardest problems in the platform, and connect day-to-day infrastructure work to why it matters for Aplazo's business. Depending on the squad's needs, you may also be designated its Tech Lead, working in partnership with the Tech Lead Manager.

What you'll work on

Owning one or more core platform systems end-to-end: CI/CD and deployments, IaC and multi-account governance, or observability and incident tooling

Driving the squad's roadmap pillars: security & infrastructure hardening, CI/CD & deployment excellence, reliability & incident management, AI platform infrastructure, and seasonality hardening

Leading incident response and post-mortems in the platform domain

Raising the engineering bar through design reviews, RFCs, hiring interviews, and mentoring E1–E3 engineers

Reducing toil by making keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) work visible and automating what actually eats the team's time

Partnering with requesting squads to turn their needs into well-scoped platform work

Key responsibilities

Technical Skills

Bring expert knowledge across multiple areas of the platform (cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, IaC, networking, observability) and of how application services run on top of them

Drive complex infrastructure design that anticipates scalability, failure modes, and regulatory impact

Align platform design with AWS Well-Architected principles: multi-account governance, safe release strategies, resilience, and cost

Master observability and cross-service debugging so others come to you for guidance

Use AI strategically for architecture exploration, large IaC refactors, and experiments; champion squad-level AI tooling such as smart alerting and automated triage

Get Stuff Done

Own large platform features or system improvements from idea to production

Structure ambiguous problems into milestones, dependencies, and risks, and deliver predictably

Lead incident response and post-mortems in the platform domain; strengthen runbooks, escalation paths, and reliability metrics

Close tasks regardless of security, networking, or cross-team dependencies

Remove squad impediments and escalate effectively when support or authority is required

Business Impact

Deliver platform projects that measurably improve key metrics (availability, DORA metrics, MTTR, cloud cost)

Understand Aplazo's business model, Mexican regulation, and LatAm credit dynamics well enough to weigh them in infrastructure decisions

Identify trade-offs that balance delivery speed against regulatory constraints (CNBV, Condusef, PCI, SOC 2)

Connect squad work to business outcomes: why it matters and how success is measured

Communication & Leadership

Act as a technical leader for the squad: design reviews, tech talks, hiring interviews, and mentoring E1–E3 engineers with demonstrable outcomes

Produce RFCs, ARRs, and design docs that make technical decisions and their rationale clear, reviewed, and discoverable

Communicate risks, dependencies, and trade-offs clearly across Engineering, Product, and leadership, challenging assumptions and proposing solutions

Ship with Datadog dashboards visible to all of engineering, plus a squad-owned runbook

Model psychological safety, constructive disagreement, and recognition in Tech All Hands, Demo Days, and Slack

What we're looking for

Required experience

5+ years in DevOps, Platform, Infrastructure, or SRE engineering with production ownership

Track record of owning entire systems or large cross-team initiatives, not just individual tickets

Experience leading incident response and writing post-mortems that drove real change

Experience mentoring engineers and leading design discussions, formally or informally

Technical skills

Strong expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation)

Deep knowledge of CI/CD systems and modern delivery practices (trunk-based development, feature flags, canary / blue-green deployments)

Hands-on experience with AWS (ECS, Fargate, EC2, Lambda, RDS/Postgres, ElastiCache, SQS, Kinesis, IAM, VPC networking)

Experience with multi-account governance (AWS Organizations / Control Tower) and cross-account resource migrations

Proficiency with observability tools: metrics, logs, traces, alerting (Datadog preferred)

Comfortable with scripting/automation in Python, Go, Bash, or Node.js/TypeScript

Solid understanding of cloud security practices, secret management, and compliance requirements

Leadership & mentoring skills

Mentors engineers through pairing, code and design reviews, and onboarding, with visible growth in the people they help

Leads through influence: facilitates design decisions without becoming a bottleneck or approval gate

Participates in hiring interviews and helps raise the bar for the squad

Gives direct, timely, kind feedback, and welcomes it in return

Soft skills

Strong communicator: direct, clear, and comfortable surfacing bad news to peers and leadership, in Spanish, with working English for vendor/partner interactions

Manages ambiguity well: adjusts to changing priorities, makes conscious trade-offs, and proposes best practices from scratch when needed

Sees guardrails as a way to remove friction, not add it

Growth mindset: seeks feedback, changes their mind when shown to be wrong, and continuously improves their own craft

Nice to have

Familiarity with GCP services (BigQuery, Pub/Sub)

Experience with MongoDB Atlas or other managed data stores

Exposure to fintech, payments, or regulated environments (CNBV, SOC 2, PCI)

Experience with security/infrastructure hardening, incident management programs, or FinOps / cloud cost optimization

Experience operating infrastructure for AI/ML workloads

Knowledge of DORA metrics and using them to drive improvement

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional or Solutions Architect – Professional (or equivalent hands-on experience)

What success looks like

The platform systems you own are reliable, observable, and documented well enough that others can operate them without you

Incidents in your domain are owned end-to-end, with thorough post-mortems and fewer repeat issues

Toil and KTLO load go down measurably because of automation you built or championed

Engineers you mentor grow faster, and the squad's technical decisions are well reasoned and documented

Requesting squads trust your read on trade-offs and priorities

Why join us

Own the infrastructure that powers financial inclusion across Latin America

Grow on a senior IC path with real technical ownership. E3 is a fork in our ladder, and moving to the Tech Lead Manager track later is an option, not an obligation

Work in a high-growth fintech at the intersection of infrastructure, delivery, and real business impact

A team with deep roots in product, technology, and culture-focused companies (Uber, Google, Rappi, Stitch Fix)

Engineering Competency Matrix note: This role maps to E3 – Lead Engineer on Aplazo's IC Ladder: someone who owns entire systems or large cross-squad features and is a technical leader of a squad. Everything at E1 and