Senior DevOps Engineer — Payments Platform / Infrastructure 12-month contract · Hybrid, downtown Toronto (3 days onsite) · T4

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer to help build and operate the infrastructure powering a real-time payments and settlement platform at a major fintech. In this role, you will own Kubernetes (EKS on AWS), CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and observability for backend services that support payment processing, ledgering, transaction orchestration, and integrations with internal and external financial systems.

You will work closely with backend engineering, infrastructure, security, and compliance teams to keep the platform reliable, secure, scalable, and auditable. This is an ideal role for an engineer who enjoys operating distributed systems under strong reliability and compliance requirements in a transaction-heavy environment.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate CI/CD pipelines for backend payment and settlement services, with automated testing, deployment gating, and rollback
• Define and manage cloud infrastructure using Terraform (Infrastructure as Code) for reproducible, auditable environments
• Run and scale containerized workloads on Kubernetes (EKS on AWS) — deployments, autoscaling, networking, ingress, secrets, RBAC, and resource management (the core of the role)
• Build and maintain observability across services: monitoring, logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting
• Drive incident response, on-call practices, and operational readiness for real-time, high-availability systems
• Implement secrets management, access controls, and hardening aligned with security and compliance requirements
• Improve deployment velocity, environment parity, and developer experience for backend (Python/FastAPI) microservices
• Collaborate with engineering, security, and operations teams on architecture, reliability, and compliance
• Contribute to engineering best practices around deployment, monitoring, security, and cost efficiency

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience in production is the primary requirement — EKS preferred (deployments, scaling, networking, ingress, secrets, RBAC, Helm)
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code, particularly Terraform
• Proven experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar)
• Strong AWS experience (EKS, EC2, IAM, VPC, S3, and related services) and containerized environments (Docker)
• Strong observability experience — Prometheus, Grafana, centralized logging, and distributed tracing
• Proficiency with scripting/automation (Python, Bash) and Git-based workflows
• Experience operating distributed systems with strong reliability requirements
• Solid understanding of cloud networking, secrets management, and access control
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across engineering, security, and operations teams

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Experience supporting payments, ledger, treasury, or other financial infrastructure systems
• Familiarity with security and compliance requirements in regulated environments
• Exposure to blockchain, digital asset, or stablecoin infrastructure
• Experience with service meshes, API gateways, or event streaming / message queues (Kafka, etc.)
• Familiarity with Temporal.io or similar workflow orchestration platforms
• Experience with cost optimization, capacity planning, and performance tuning at scale
• Configuration management (Ansible) and policy-as-code experience

Technical Environment

• Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS) — primary focus, Docker
• IaC: Terraform
• CI/CD: GitLab CI / GitHub Actions / Jenkins
• Cloud: AWS (EKS, EC2, IAM, VPC, S3, CloudWatch, and related services)
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, logging, metrics, tracing, alerting
• Scripting: Python, Bash
• Architecture: Microservices / distributed systems / event-driven systems
• Optional: Temporal.io, blockchain infrastructure, service mesh, message queues

What You'll Work On

• CI/CD and deployment automation for real-time settlement and payment orchestration services
• Cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes platform supporting transaction processing and reconciliation workflows
• Observability, alerting, and incident response for high-availability financial systems
• Secrets management, access control, and compliance-aligned infrastructure hardening
• Reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency improvements across backend services
• Internal tooling and platform enablement for backend, finance, and operations teams