DevOps Engineer (Systems-Focused)

About the Role

Our client is hiring a DevOps Engineer who understands how systems actually work under the hood.

This role goes beyond managing cloud infrastructure or setting up CI/CD pipelines. The focus is on ensuring high availability, performance, and reliability across production systems, with a strong emphasis on debugging, traffic routing, and system behavior under real-world constraints.

Candidates who rely primarily on tools without understanding underlying systems will not be a fit for this role.

What You’ll Do

• Design and maintain highly available systems with zero or minimal downtime

• Manage and optimize traffic routing using reverse proxies (e.g. Nginx)

• Diagnose and resolve production issues across the full request lifecycle (frontend → backend → database)

• Implement deployment strategies that avoid service disruption without relying solely on orchestration tools

• Monitor system performance and proactively identify bottlenecks

• Investigate and resolve database performance issues (MySQL/PostgreSQL)

• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve system reliability and performance

• Handle incident response and root cause analysis in production environments

Core Requirements (Must-Have)

1. Strong Systems & Networking Fundamentals

• Deep understanding of how web requests flow across systems

• Hands-on experience with reverse proxies like Nginx (routing, proxying, load balancing)

• Solid grasp of DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, and network-level debugging

2. Zero-Downtime & Deployment Understanding

• Experience implementing zero-downtime or low-downtime deployments

• Ability to design solutions using existing infrastructure (e.g. multiple instances, traffic shifting)

• Understanding of rolling updates or blue-green deployments without relying entirely on Kubernetes

3. Backend / Application Awareness

• Ability to understand backend services (APIs, request handling, service communication)

• Experience working with or supporting backend systems (Node.js, Java, Python, etc.)

4. Database Fundamentals (Critical)

• Strong working knowledge of MySQL or PostgreSQL

• Ability to:

  • Identify long-running queries

  • Debug performance issues

  • Understand indexing and query optimization basics

• Familiarity with query inspection and process monitoring

5. Observability & Debugging

• Experience with monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, etc.)

• Ability to debug real production issues, not just set up dashboards

• Strong problem-solving approach under pressure

What Our Client Is Not Looking For

• Engineers who rely primarily on tools without understanding underlying systems

• “Kubernetes-only” profiles without strong fundamentals

• Candidates who cannot debug issues without introducing new tools or infrastructure

Hiring Process

Our client’s evaluation focuses on:

• Real-world problem solving

• System-level thinking

• Understanding of infrastructure internals

Candidates should be comfortable explaining how systems behave and how they would solve problems using first principles.