DevOps Engineer at Smallest (Bengaluru, India)
Smallest · Bengaluru, India·
Role details
Job description
DevOps Engineer
About the Role
We’re looking for a hands-on DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer who enjoys building systems that run reliably in production. You’ve seen early-stage chaos, fast scale-ups, or have built serious infrastructure on your own. You understand that reliability is earned through ownership, automation, and clean engineering — not titles or years of experience. You will take approved system architecture and turn it into real, working infrastructure, translating High-Level Designs (HLD) into practical, battle-tested Low-Level Designs (LLD). This is a deeply execution-focused role. You will work on production systems every day — deploying, scaling, observing, fixing, and improving them continuously. At Smallest, infrastructure is not a support function — it is the product.
What We Care About (More Than Experience)
We do not care about years of experience. We care about:
- Your understanding of our platform. This is important.
- Your approach towards client satisfaction
- Your ability to design and operate systems that don’t fall over
- Your instinct to determine what to automate and when to automate
- Your understanding of how systems behave under real traffic
- Your willingness to take ownership when production breaks
- Your ability to debug calmly, fix permanently, and document clearly
- You are flexible and agile
If you’ve learned these skills through startups, side projects, homelabs, open source, or real production failures — you’re qualified.
Key Responsibilities
- Implement and manage AWS-centric cloud infrastructure using Terraform
- Operate Kubernetes (EKS) clusters across multiple environments
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions
- Deploy services using Helm and Argo CD (GitOps)
- Implement canary, blue/green, and rolling deployments
- Build and manage Docker images and registries
- Configure monitoring, alerting, and logging using New Relic and CloudWatch
- Manage AWS networking: VPCs, subnets, routing, ALB/NLB, security groups
- Support RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, Redis, and MongoDB infrastructure
- Support frontend delivery using CloudFront and AWS Amplify
- Write automation scripts in Bash, Python, or Go
- Troubleshoot incidents and participate in postmortems
Required Skill Set
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS and Kubernetes
- Solid Linux and networking fundamentals
- CI/CD pipeline design and ownership mindset
- Production debugging and incident handling experience
- Knowledge of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets
Strong Plus
- Startup or scale-up production exposure
- DevOps/SRE side projects or homelabs
- Open-source contributions in cloud-native ecosystem
- Experience with cost optimization and capacity planning
- Terraform-based infrastructure automation
- Helm and GitOps-based deployment workflows
Mindset We Value
- High ownership and accountability
- Comfort working in ambiguity
- Automation-first thinking
- Reliability over velocity without safety
- Strong bias toward learning from failures
If you have the need for speed, action bias, enjoy building infrastructure that scales, fixing real production problems, and making systems boringly reliable — this role is for you.
Why work at Smallest
- Engineering Culture: Small research lab with a focus on bleeding‑edge model efficiency; strong emphasis on shipping production‑grade systems.
- Remote/Hybrid Policy: Not explicitly stated; offices in San Francisco, India, and Canada, suggesting a hybrid or flexible approach.
- Notable Perks: Opportunity to work on frontier AI models from scratch, influence product direction, and deploy at scale. Access to enterprise‑grade infrastructure and compliance frameworks.
- Team Composition: 20% technical, 9% research, with founders deeply involved; talent sourced from top tech firms (Qualcomm, Meesho, Observe.AI).