Senior DevOps & Site Reliability Engineer (AWS)

About HAAS Alert

HAAS Alert operates Safety Cloud®, the largest connected transportation + road safety platform in the world. We send real-time digital alerts to drivers and vehicles through their integrated screens and phones as they approach active first responder vehicles, emergency scenes, work zones, and other hazards on the road.

Working with emergency responders, fleets, road operators, and automakers, our vision is singular and urgent: a connected, collision-free world where everyone gets home safely.

Why HAAS Alert

You'll join a mission-driven company whose technology helps protect first responders, roadway workers, and drivers every day. Our platform supports critical, real-time communications, making reliability, performance, and security essential to everything we do.

You'll have the opportunity to take ownership of our AWS infrastructure, identify opportunities for improvement, and build scalable systems that support our continued growth. This is a hands-on role with meaningful technical ownership, direct collaboration with engineering leadership, and the freedom to proactively improve how we operate.

The Role

We're looking for an experienced Senior DevOps & Site Reliability Engineer (AWS) to own the reliability, security, performance, monitoring, and continuous improvement of our cloud infrastructure.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with broad technical ownership. You'll be responsible for keeping our AWS environments secure, scalable, and highly available while continuously identifying opportunities to improve performance, automate processes, and reduce operational risk.

We're looking for someone who takes initiative, anticipates problems before they happen, and enjoys building solutions rather than simply responding to tickets. You'll work closely with engineering and security teams to strengthen our infrastructure, improve the developer experience, and ensure our systems can scale alongside the business.

If you thrive in a startup environment, enjoy solving complex technical challenges, and want to make a measurable impact on a mission-driven product, we'd love to hear from you.

What You'll Do

Own AWS infrastructure & architecture

• Manage AWS environments: Own production and non-production AWS infrastructure, including ECS Fargate, EC2, Aurora PostgreSQL, MSK/Kafka, SQS, ElastiCache/Redis, S3, CloudWatch, IAM, and networking.
• Build scalable infrastructure: Maintain secure, highly available systems using Terraform, CloudFormation, or comparable infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Maintain documentation: Keep architecture diagrams, system inventories, operational runbooks, and infrastructure documentation accurate and up to date.

Drive reliability, monitoring & incident response

• Improve visibility: Build and maintain actionable dashboards, alerts, and automated health checks that identify issues early and reduce unnecessary noise.
• Monitor system health: Track service-level indicators and objectives, event-processing latency, Kafka consumer lag, queue backlogs, database health, and overall availability.
• Own incident response: Lead incident investigations, root-cause analysis, and preventive improvements while maintaining clear escalation procedures and on-call runbooks.

Optimize performance, capacity & cost

• Improve performance: Continuously evaluate infrastructure performance, resource utilization, system capacity, and potential bottlenecks.
• Increase scalability: Partner with application engineers to improve ECS scaling, data-processing throughput, PostgreSQL performance, and system resilience.
• Manage cloud costs: Review AWS spending and identify opportunities for savings through right-sizing, architectural improvements, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans.

Build automation & operational excellence

• Own CI/CD workflows: Improve Bitbucket Pipelines and AWS deployment processes, including reliable rollbacks and consistent environment configurations.
• Automate processes: Eliminate repetitive infrastructure, deployment, maintenance, and verification tasks through automation.
• Drive continuous improvement: Maintain a prioritized infrastructure roadmap and regularly communicate system health, risks, and progress to engineering leadership.

Strengthen security, compliance & recovery

• Partner on security: Work closely with Security Engineering to improve IAM, networking, secrets management, encryption, logging, and vulnerability remediation.
• Support compliance: Maintain infrastructure documentation and operational evidence supporting SOC 2 and ISO 27001 requirements.
• Own recovery readiness: Maintain backup and disaster-recovery plans and validate restoration procedures through scheduled testing.

What You Bring

• 6+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or cloud/platform engineering, including significant hands-on ownership of AWS production environments. (Required.)
• Deep AWS expertise with ECS, networking, IAM, observability, Linux, containers, and infrastructure as code, preferably Terraform. (Required.)
• Strong automation skills with experience building CI/CD pipelines and scripting in Python, Bash, or similar languages. (Required.)
• Hands-on troubleshooting experience with distributed applications, relational databases such as PostgreSQL, and event/message-processing systems.
• A proactive, ownership-driven mindset: You identify reliability, performance, and infrastructure improvements without waiting to be asked and take responsibility for delivering solutions.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills: You're comfortable investigating complex technical issues, identifying root causes, and implementing long-term improvements.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills: You can work effectively with software engineers, security teams, and engineering leadership.
• A startup mentality: You're resourceful, adaptable, and comfortable balancing competing priorities while maintaining reliable systems.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Amazon MSK/Apache Kafka, Redis, SQS, Aurora PostgreSQL, and multi-region AWS architectures.
• Experience supporting Ruby on Rails and Node.js applications, particularly high-throughput, event-driven systems.
• Familiarity with SOC 2, ISO 27001, disaster recovery, service-level objectives (SLOs), service-level indicators (SLIs), and incident management.
• AWS professional-level certification or equivalent demonstrated expertise.

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: Complete an assessment of our infrastructure, identify operational risks and monitoring gaps, and establish a prioritized improvement plan.
• By 60 days: Improve critical monitoring and alerting, establish baseline performance metrics, and begin implementing reliability improvements.
• By 90 days: Assume primary operational ownership, strengthen incident and disaster-recovery documentation, and demonstrate measurable improvements in reliability, automation, and infrastructure visibility.

Position Details & Benefits

• Full-time position, 40 hours per week.
• United States-based, with remote or hybrid work arrangement to be confirmed.
• Compensation: $160,000 to $190,000 annually, depending on experience.
• Stock options.
• Benefits: Health, Dental, and Vision insurance.

Pay: $160,000.00 - $190,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Flexible schedule
• Health insurance
• Vision insurance

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Chicago, IL 60614