DevOps Engineer

Engagement Type | Independent contractor (services agreement)

Availability | General overlap with U.S. Eastern Time

About LoanBud

LoanBud is a fast-growing fintech platform dedicated to SBA financing, connecting entrepreneurs to a nationwide network of lenders and helping small business owners access capital through a streamlined, technology-driven process. We pride ourselves on a collaborative culture, meaningful work, and a strong commitment to supporting the backbone of the economy — small businesses.

Engagement Overview

LoanBud is seeking an independent contractor to provide senior DevOps engineering services, helping

build, secure, and scale the cloud infrastructure behind our proprietary lending and workflow platform.

This is a hands-on engagement focused on our AWS environment, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and production reliability. The contractor will work closely with our engineering team to keep the platform fast, secure, and dependable as we grow.

We are looking for a provider comfortable working inside an existing production environment — someone who can understand the current setup, harden and improve it thoughtfully, and own infrastructure problems from diagnosis through to a reliable fix. We are not looking for someone who wants to rebuild everything from scratch.

Scope of Services

The contractor will provide services which may include:

• Design, build, and maintain AWS infrastructure supporting the LoanBud platform.
• Manage infrastructure as code using Terraform.
• Build, improve, and maintain CI/CD pipelines for reliable, repeatable deployments.
• Manage containerization and orchestration (Kurbernetes and related tooling).
• Set up and maintain monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability across production systems.
• Improve system reliability, uptime, scalability, and incident response.
• Support secure handling of sensitive customer and financial data, including secrets management and access controls.
• Manage database infrastructure, backups, and disaster-recovery processes for PostgreSQL.
• Support background job infrastructure and scheduled processes (e.g., JobRunR).
• Diagnose and resolve production infrastructure issues, failed deployments, and performance bottlenecks.
• Optimize cloud cost, performance, and resource usage.
• Collaborate with engineers on release management and production deployments.
• Document infrastructure, runbooks, and operational procedures.
• Communicate clearly about progress, risks, dependencies, and blockers.
• Take ownership of agreed deliverables and follow through until working reliably in production.

Required Experience and Capabilities

• Five or more years of professional DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS in production.
• Strong experience with infrastructure as code, especially Terraform.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with containerization (Kurbernetes) and orchestration.
• Experience with monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability tooling (e.g., Datadog).
• Strong understanding of cloud security, secrets management, and access control.
• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL), backups, and disaster recovery.
• Understanding secure practices for handling sensitive customer and financial information.
• Ability to troubleshoot across infrastructure, deployments, networking, and third-party integrations.
• Strong written and spoken English.
• General availability for collaboration overlapping U.S. Eastern Time business hours.
• Strong organizational skills, personal accountability, and attention to detail.
• Ability to work autonomously while maintaining clear communication and visibility.
• Willingness to work within and improve an existing environment rather than unnecessarily replacing working systems.

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting Java/Spring Boot applications in production.
• Familiarity with AWS S3, scheduled jobs, and asynchronous workflows.
• Experience in fintech, lending, payments, or another regulated environment.
• Scripting experience (Python, Bash, or similar).
• Experience with cost optimization at scale.

Working Arrangement

This is a fully remote independent contractor engagement. The contractor determines their own working schedule, methods, and location, and provides their own equipment, workspace, and internet access.

For collaboration purposes, the contractor should generally be reachable during an availability window overlapping U.S. Eastern Time business hours to participate in planning sessio