Senior DevOps & Infrastructure Engineer

About the role

M1 Finance is seeking a Senior DevOps & Infrastructure Engineer to join our team in Chicago. This role represents a critical leadership position entrusted with designing, operating, and continuously improving the foundational platforms that power our financial services. The successful candidate will bring deeply production-hardened experience to shape our infrastructure strategy, ensure unwavering reliability, and enable rapid, safe delivery of new features. You will own the full lifecycle of complex systems, guiding them from initial design through ongoing operations with a primary focus on resilience, security, and automation. This position demands a high level of ownership and strategic thinking to navigate complex technical challenges. You will be a key influence in defining how our infrastructure evolves to meet future demands. Your work will directly impact the stability and performance of the systems our customers rely on every day. We value individuals who take pride in building and maintaining robust, scalable platforms.

Key facts

What you'll do

You will design and evolve our AWS-based foundation, including account organization, network architecture, and routing topologies to support both cloud and on-premises requirements. A core responsibility will involve hardening the reliability of our hybrid and on-premises connectivity, ensuring critical systems remain available and performant under all conditions. You will operate and evolve our Kubernetes (EKS) clusters, managing the in-cluster platform services that include ingress controllers, service mesh implementations, autoscaling policies, and network configurations. Building and refining our observability layer will be a major focus, encompassing metrics collection, log aggregation, distributed tracing, and actionable alerting so engineering teams can understand system behavior and resolve issues before they impact customers. You will lead efforts to expand our self-service platform and automate CI/CD and GitOps workflows, ensuring routine changes are executed safely, consistently, and without manual intervention. Maintaining security discipline will be a key duty, including the thoughtful management of secrets and the enforcement of least-privilege access controls as the platform scales. You will share on-call responsibilities, applying an SRE mindset to drive improvements in reliability, cost efficiency, and the reduction of operational toil. Furthermore, you will partner closely with cross-functional teams to translate business requirements into robust technical infrastructure solutions. You will also contribute to architectural reviews and design discussions, providing technical leadership and guidance to other engineers. Your role will include mentoring and supporting other engineers on best practices for infrastructure management.

Requirements

You must have several years of experience, typically five or more, building and running production infrastructure or platforms. The role demands real judgment gained from owning systems through actual failures, not just times when everything functioned normally. While we value diverse backgrounds, we are looking for depth of experience above the specific origin of that experience. You must demonstrate hands-on depth across multiple critical areas and be able to quickly master additional technologies as needed. Essential expertise includes cloud infrastructure on AWS, production-grade Kubernetes operations using EKS, and infrastructure-as-code practices with Terraform. You must possess strong skills in CI/CD and GitOps-style automated delivery, utilizing tools such as CircleCI and Flux. A solid understanding of observability practices, including metrics, logs, traces, and alerting, is required. You will also have a firm grasp of secrets management and secure, least-privilege access models. Deep knowledge of networking and Linux fundamentals is essential. This includes TCP/IP, DNS, routing and subnetting, firewalls and security groups, load balancing, and TLS. Experience with general database administration and systems administration is a plus. Familiarity with Kafka or other event-streaming platforms is beneficial. Experience working in regulated environments, such as those requiring ISO 27001 or SOC 2 compliance, or direct collaboration with auditors, is a welcome bonus. Practical experience with Windows administration, PowerShell, and SQL Server is also noted as an advantage. Experience with agentic AI tooling and securing related workflows is considered a bonus. If you are a strong senior engineer with a passion for this work, even if your background comes from an adjacent stack or a less conventional path, we encourage you to apply.

Nice to have

Only preferred items explicitly mentioned in the source appear here; none are specified beyond the requirements.

Practical notes

This is a full-time position based in Chicago, US. M1 Finance is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity across the company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. Please We are excited to review your application.

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Please We are excited to review your application.