Senior Cloud DevOps Engineer at Digital Zone

About the Company

Digital Zone is a key regional player and the Iraqi champion in the e-commerce (e-goods) sector, serving millions of customers on a daily basis.

In our short lifetime since Digital Zone was founded, we achieved growth and success metrics that are unforeseen in the region, where “stretch for amazing” became our daily business. Our success is outgrowing our capacity, and now is the time where we grow our team.

Our Tech team consists of carefully picked top-notch engineers. Our technical leads are hands-on and battle-tested. We know the formula for great Software Engineering, and we strive to do what it takes to nourish a healthy, productive, and efficient culture.

About the Role

The Senior Cloud DevOps Engineer will take a leading role in designing, building, and operating our cloud and platform infrastructure using modern DevOps and GitOps practices. You will own the architectural decisions behind our AWS infrastructure, drive Infrastructure-as-Code adoption across regions, and act as a go-to escalation point for complex infrastructure challenges in both staging and production environments.

Lead the ownership and scalability of our large-scale PostgreSQL database infrastructure. This includes driving sharding, optimizing query and index performance, and managing major version upgrades with minimal downtime. You will be essential for maintaining a fast, healthy, and scalable data layer.

You will work closely with engineering teams to unblock and support them on infrastructure and database needs, lead disaster recovery planning, and proactively identify and mitigate failure scenarios before they impact production. This is a senior, high-impact role with direct influence on how Digital Zone operates at scale.

Who Are We Looking For?

This is the right role for you if:

• You have deep, battle-tested experience running production workloads on AWS — not just theoretical knowledge, but real scars from real incidents.
• You think in terms of architecture first and default to designing for resilience, not just making things work.
• You treat Infrastructure-as-Code as a discipline, not a convenience.
• You have deep PostgreSQL expertise and have personally dealt with the pain of growing databases — sharding decisions, slow query investigations, vacuum tuning, replication lag, and major version upgrades on live systems.
• You take ownership end-to-end: from RFC to production, including on-call and post-incident reviews.
• You are a builder of safety nets — you proactively identify failure modes and create runbooks and systems to handle them before they happen.
• You see yourself as an enabler for engineering teams, not a gatekeeper.
• You thrive in ambiguity, communicate clearly, and are comfortable working fully remotely with a high degree of autonomy.

Responsibilities

• AWS Infrastructure Architecture & Design: Design, architect, and implement scalable, secure, and cost-efficient AWS infrastructure across multiple regions, aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
• Infrastructure-as-Code: Build, maintain, and evolve all cloud infrastructure using Terraform, enforcing module reusability, remote state management, and IaC best practices across environments.
• Own and optimize PostgreSQL database: including performance, scalability, and reliability. Lead sharding, optimize queries/indexes, manage connection pooling (PgBouncer), oversee replication, and execute major version upgrades with minimal downtime. Collaborate on performance-driven schema design.
• Kubernetes & Platform Operations: Deploy, manage, and optimize workloads on Kubernetes clusters using Helm and Kustomize. Drive cluster upgrades, scaling strategies, and security hardening.
• CI/CD & Automation: Design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions. Champion pipeline reliability and developer experience.
• GitOps Workflows: Lead GitOps practices using ArgoCD for application and infrastructure lifecycle management. Establish patterns and standards for the team.
• Disaster Recovery & Proactive Planning: Lead DR planning, runbook creation, and failure scenario modeling — including database backup and recovery strategies. Proactively identify infrastructure risks and implement mitigation strategies before incidents occur.
• Debugging & Troubleshooting: Act as the senior escalation point for complex infrastructure and database issues across staging and production. Lead root cause analysis and drive permanent fixes.
• Engineering Team Enablement: Support and unblock engineering teams on infrastructure and database needs. Act as a trusted partner for developers, platform, and security teams.
• Reliability & Observability: Operate and improve monitoring, logging, and alerting systems — including database-specific monitoring (query performance, replication health, connection saturation) — to ensure high availability and fast incident response.
• Production Support: Participate in and help improve the weekly on-call rotation. Mentor junior team members on incident response and operational best practices.
• Data & Analytics Platforms: Support and optimize deployments of data and analytics systems such as Airflow, Airbyte, Metabase, and similar platforms.
• Continuous Improvement: Drive automation, standardization, and best practices across infrastructure, database operations, deployment, and operational workflows.

Qualifications

• 6–8+ years of professional experience in Cloud Engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles, with a proven track record operating highly scalable, high-availability systems in production.
• Deep, hands-on experience with AWS core services (EKS, ECS, EC2, VPC, IAM, RDS, Amazon Aurora, S3, Route 53, CloudFront, ALB/NLB, etc.) in real production workloads.
• Expert-level proficiency with Terraform, including module design, remote state management, and multi-environment/multi-region setups.
• Strong PostgreSQL expertise in production, including: query and index performance tuning, sharding strategies (e.g., application-level sharding, or partitioning), replication setup and management (streaming, logical), connection pooling (PgBouncer), vacuum tuning, and planning/executing major version upgrades with minimal downtime.
• Experience managing large-scale PostgreSQL databases (hundreds of GBs to TBs) under high-traffic workloads, with a solid understanding of how schema design, indexing, and partitioning decisions affect performance at scale.
• Strong production experience operating and optimizing Kubernetes clusters (deployments, scaling, RBAC, networking, security policies, cluster upgrades).
• Proven experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions.
• Solid experience with GitOps principles and tools; hands-on experience with ArgoCD is strongly preferred.
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals (DNS, VPC peering, Transit Gateway, VPN, load balancing) and cloud security best practices.
• Experience with logging, monitoring, and alerting stacks (e.g., ELK, EFK, LGTM, CloudWatch) across multiple environments, including database-specific monitoring.
• Proficiency in Bash and Python for automation and tooling.
• Strong Git workflow knowledge, including branching strategies and code review practices.
• Experience designing and implementing multi-region architectures with failover and DR strategies.

Nice To Have

• Experience with PostgreSQL extensions and ecosystem tools such as Citus, pg_stat_statements, pganalyze, pg_repack, or Patroni for high availability.
• Experience with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, including migration from standard RDS PostgreSQL and Aurora-specific operational patterns.
• Experience leading AWS Well-Architected Reviews in production environments.
• Experience deploying and managing Keycloak or similar identity and access management solutions at scale.
• AWS Professional-level certifications (Solutions Architect Professional, DevOps Engineer Professional) or equivalent.
• Experience mentoring junior/mid-level DevOps engineers.
• Experience in fast-growing startups with high ownership and cross-functional collaboration.
• Familiarity with cost optimization strategies and FinOps principles on AWS.

Wy Join Us?

• Work on critical infrastructure and data systems that directly impact millions of users across the region.
• Be part of an ambitious, high-caliber engineering team with strong technical leadership.
• Take real ownership of production systems and influence platform and architectural decisions at the highest level.
• Enjoy flexible work arrangements (remote or hybrid) and a culture that values learning, experimentation, and excellence.
• Shape the infrastructure practices and standards for a rapidly growing company.