Senior Software Engineer, Devops

About this role

ABOUT SLATE
At Slate, we’re building safe, reliable vehicles that people can afford, personalize and love—and doing it here in the USA as part of our commitment to reindustrialization. The spirit of DIY and customization runs throughout every element of a Slate, because people should have control over how their trucks look, feel, and represent them.
Who we are looking for

Slate is looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer to build and operate the infrastructure that our digital, data, manufacturing and enterprise teams depend on. We don't separate DevOps from SRE. The team that builds the platform also runs it, carries the pager, and is accountable for its reliability.
You'll work across a multi-account AWS organization and help stand up a hybrid Kubernetes platform that spans Amazon EKS and self-managed clusters in our own facilities. You'll be a day-to-day partner to the teams we support: taking their requests, turning them into well-built infrastructure, and helping them ship and debug in production.
You will report to the leader of the DevOps team and take part in the team's on-call rotation.

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The Builder: You like shipping infrastructure that works and keeps working. You write it as code, you test it, and you leave it better documented than you found it.

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The Troubleshooter: When something breaks, you follow the evidence from the load balancer to the pod to the log line, and you fix the cause, not just the symptom.

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The Partner: You treat the teams you support as customers. You ask what they are trying to do before you answer the request as written.

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The Automator: If you've done something by hand twice, you're already scripting the third time.

What you get to do

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Build and Run the Hybrid Kubernetes Platform: Stand up and operate Amazon EKS clusters and self-managed Kubernetes clusters on virtualized infrastructure provided by our IT team. Own cluster provisioning, add-ons, upgrades and day-two operations.

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Deliver and Extend Our AWS Environment: Build infrastructure in Python with AWS CDK across our multi-account organization, including networking, IAM, DNS, compute, containers, databases and storage.

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Partner with the Teams We Serve: Work directly with our Digital teams (customer-facing website and backend services), Data Engineering and other teams across Slate to deliver the environments, access and pipelines they need, and help them resolve production issues.

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Own Pipelines and Deployment Patterns: Build and maintain CI/CD workflows, reusable GitHub Actions, container build and release patterns, and GitOps deployments to Kubernetes.

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Keep Things Running: Take part in the on-call rotation, respond to incidents, write postmortems for the incidents you handle, and follow through on the fixes. Build the dashboards and alerts that make problems visible early.

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Automate Away Toil: Turn repeated requests into self-service tooling and repeatable automation, so the team spends its time on the next problem rather than the last one.

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Document and Share: Write the runbooks, how-to guides and design notes that let teammates and the teams we support work without waiting on you.

What you bring to the team

• 6+ years in DevOps, site reliability, platform or infrastructure engineering, with hands-on responsibility for production systems.

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Strong AWS Experience: Hands-on experience building and operating production workloads on AWS, including IAM, VPC networking, EC2, EKS or ECS, Lambda, RDS, S3, Route 53 and CloudWatch. Experience in a multi-account environment is a plus, as is an AWS Associate or Professional certification.

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Kubernetes Operations: Production experience operating Kubernetes, ideally both EKS and self-managed clusters. You're comfortable debugging workloads, networking and storage, and carrying out cluster upgrades. Experience with Rancher or a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification is a plus.

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Python and Infrastructure as Code: Strong Python skills are required; our platform code is written in Python. Experience with infrastructure as code is required, and AWS CDK is preferred. You can read, understand and make targeted changes to TypeScript, which some of our application teams use.

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CI/CD and Containers: Experience building pipelines with GitHub Actions or similar tools, building and securing container images, and deploying with Helm and GitOps tooling such as Argo CD or Flux.

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Observability and On-Call: Experience with monitoring and logging tools (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, CloudWatch or similar) and with participating in an on-call rotation for production systems.

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Linux and Networking Fundamentals: Solid Linux administration skills and a working understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, TLS certificates and VPN connectivity.

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Clear Communication: Ability to explain technical trade-offs to engineers and non-engineers, and to keep requesters informed while you work.

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Startup Orientation: Comfort in a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment where priorities shift and ownership is broad.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience supporting data platforms, databases or data pipelines.

• Exposure to manufacturing, industrial or OT environments.

• Familiarity with enterprise virtualization platforms such as VMware.

• Experience with policy as code, secrets management tooling, or software supply chain security.

WORK AUTHORIZATION REQUIREMENT

Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States on a permanent basis. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship at this time.

SALARY RANGE
The compensation for this position is the range Slate reasonably and in good faith expects to pay for the position taking into account the wide variety of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions, including job-related knowledge; skillset; experience, education and training; certifications; work location;…