Senior Devops Engineer in Richmond

Lead the evolution of tails.com’s AWS platform - design scalable, secure, resilient systems & turn complexity into clear, modern patterns. We’re Tails.com, a dog food subscription company with a big difference. We create truly tailored food for each and every dog we serve. We start by asking people a few simple questions about their dog. Then we use that information to create their dog’s unique tails.com recipe – so their dog gets exactly the nutrition they need, in the taste they love, delivered to their door every month. We’ve got bold plans. Having created an entirely new category in pet food, we’re now scaling fast – backed by Purina, one of the world’s largest pet food companies. You’ll join a bunch of smart people working towards the same goals. Together, we’ll change the world of pet food for good.

How you can make a difference: We want to reshape our cloud platform so it is intentionally designed for where the business is heading - scalable, resilient, secure, and cost-effective by design rather than by accumulation. As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will help lead that evolution from within the platform. You will take a critical, system-level view of our AWS environment, its architecture, deployment model, resilience patterns, observability, security guardrails, and cost structure, and help define what good looks like for the next phase of tails.com. This is not about incremental patching or maintaining the status quo. It is about applying sound engineering judgement to decide what should be retained, what should be simplified, and what should be redesigned. You will help turn accumulated complexity into clear, repeatable platform patterns that enable engineering teams to move quickly and safely.

Key Responsibilities:

• Cloud & Platform Engineering: Own and evolve the AWS platform architecture for scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency. Lead architectural redesign where systems show strain or fragility. Establish reusable infrastructure patterns that reduce drift and technical debt. Improve operational maturity through strong observability and reliability practices.
• DevOps & Automation: Design release strategies that keep production changes safe and predictable. Eliminate manual processes through automation across the platform. Turn incidents into architectural improvements through effective remediation. Improve developer experience by making the right way the easy way.
• Security, Guardrails & Resilience: Embed secure-by-default principles into platform architecture and delivery pipelines. Strengthen cloud identity boundaries, isolation, and defence-in-depth. Partner with the tails.com security team to evolve resilience, monitoring, and threat detection capabilities. Ensure backup, recovery, and failure-domain strategies are deliberate, tested, and robust.
• Collaboration & Technical Influence: Engage early in service design to ensure reliability, scalability, and security are built in. Challenge designs that introduce risk or unnecessary complexity. Contribute to platform standards and reference architectures. Raise engineering standards through example, peer review, and pragmatic mentorship.

Skills & Qualifications:

• Significant experience building and evolving AWS cloud platforms in production.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability, resilience, and operational risk.
• Deep experience with Infrastructure as Code and platform automation.
• Experience designing safe, reliable deployment and release strategies.
• Strong grasp of cloud security fundamentals and secure-by-default architecture.
• Experience working with security teams to strengthen resilience and detection capabilities.
• Solid scripting and automation capability.
• Clear communicator, able to translate technical risk into pragmatic improvements.

Key Attributes:

• Platform-minded and systems-oriented.
• Reliability-focused and comfortable designing for failure.
• Security-aware and pragmatic.
• Influential through technical credibility rather than authority.
• Calm under pressure and outcome-driven.

What's in it for you:

• Competitive salary, reviewed annually.
• Annual bonus, based on company performance.
• Flexible core hours, giving you true work-life balance.
• Hybrid role to ensure this role works for you.
• 25 days of holiday (excluding bank holidays) which increases over time to a max of 27 days.
• 9/10 day working week to enhance your wellbeing without a reduction in pay and leave allowance.
• Optional 5 days unpaid leave and 1 paid volunteer day each year.
• Health insurance for you, paid by Tails.com.
• Extended maternity, paternity, shared parental and adoption pay.
• In-house L&D team, with access to year-round courses to help drive your development.
• 50% discount on all tails.com.
• Discounted gym membership.

Our Commitment: We’re proud to be an active equal opportunity employer. We want to give everyone a fair chance to join us in changing the world of pet food for good. We do this by conducting a structured recruitment process for all candidates, as well as actively promoting our roles to communities that are under-represented at Tails.com.