DevSecOps Engineering Lead
DevSecOps Engineering LeadCloud Infrastructure, Security & Platform Reliability About 21X21X is building the next generation of conversational AI.Our platform powers intelligent AI agents that communicate with customers through voice, SMS, RCS, email, and web—helping businesses automate conversations, execute workflows, and deliver exceptional customer experiences at scale. About the Role21X is hiring a hands-on DevSecOps Engineering Lead to own and scale the cloud infrastructure, security, deployment automation, and production reliability of our conversational AI platform. This is a highly technical, implementation-intensive role. You’ll be responsible for designing infrastructure, writing automation, securing our environments, improving deployment pipelines, and ensuring our systems operate reliably at enterprise scale. You’ll work across our core backend services, real-time voice infrastructure, and customer-facing applications, supporting both containerized and serverless environments on AWS.Your strongest expertise should be in AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud security—with the ability to independently design, implement, and operate production infrastructure. What You’ll OwnYou’ll take ownership of five interconnected areas:1. AWS Cloud Infrastructure Design, build, and maintain the infrastructure supporting our conversational AI platform.
Responsibilities include:
- AWS account architecture, environment isolation, and networking
- Infrastructure provisioning and automation through TerraformIAM, workload identity, encryption, and secrets management
- Compute, storage, DNS, TLS, and load balancing
- Cloud resource optimization, capacity planning, and infrastructure scalability
Technologies:
AWS, Terraform, EKS, VPC, IAM, KMS, S3, Route 53, ACM, Secrets Manager.2. CI/CD & Developer Infrastructure Build and maintain automated delivery systems that allow our engineering team to deploy software quickly, securely, and reliably.
Responsibilities include:
- CI/CD pipeline design and optimization
- Automated builds, testing, and deployment
- GitOps workflows and environment promotion
- Container image management and artifact security
- Self-hosted runners, build infrastructure, and release automation
- Deployment validation, rollback, and recovery
Technologies:
GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Docker, ECR, Argo CD, Kustomize, Helm, Actions Runner Controller.3. Core Backend Infrastructure Ensure our backend services remain reliable, scalable, and operationally efficient.
Responsibilities include:
- Containerized backend deployments and runtime managementAPI and background worker infrastructure
- Database connectivity, caching, and configuration management
- Environment upgrades, monitoring, and production troubleshooting
Technologies:
Python, Flask, Celery, MongoDB, Redis, Docker, ECS.4. Real-Time Voice & AI Infrastructure Own the infrastructure supporting our real-time conversational AI and telephony platform.
Responsibilities include:
- Low-latency infrastructure for live AI voice conversations
- Kubernetes workload deployment, isolation, and scaling
- WebSocket connectivity, networking, and load balancing
- High-availability architecture and provider connectivity
- Safe deployments that account for active voice sessions
- Database, connection and recording storage management
- Monitoring and troubleshooting latency, resource contention, and service failures
Technologies:
EKS, Kubernetes, AWS Load Balancing, Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis, S3, TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, WebSockets.5. Customer-Facing Application Delivery Manage the secure and reliable delivery of our customer-facing web applications.
Responsibilities include:
- Secure frontend build and deployment pipelines
- Serverless infrastructure and release automation
- Environment configuration and secrets management
- Backend connectivity and application monitoring
Technologies: Next.js, React, TypeScript, SST/OpenNext, AWS Lambda, CircleCI, GraphQL.
What You’ll Do:
Own cloud infrastructure. Design, provision, and operate secure, scalable AWS environments using Terraform and infrastructure as code.
Lead DevSecOps engineering. Build security directly into infrastructure, application delivery, and operational processes.
Operate Kubernetes environments. Manage EKS clusters, networking, autoscaling, resource scheduling, upgrades, and production troubleshooting.
Automate software delivery. Build and improve CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, testing gates, container builds, and deployment automation.
Strengthen cloud security. Implement least-privilege access, workload identity, network controls, encryption, secret rotation, and vulnerability management.
Partner on application security. Work with engineers to improve authentication, authorization, tenant isolation, API security, and protection of sensitive customer data.
Improve production reliability. Build meaningful observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response processes.
Optimize real-time performance. Diagnose latency, WebSocket failures, scaling bottlenecks, and infrastructure issues affecting live AI conversations.
Own disaster recovery. Establish and test backup, restoration, failover, and recovery procedures for critical systems.
Drive engineering efficiency. Improve cloud cost visibility, deployment speed, resource utilization, and platform maintainability.
Provide technical leadership. Review infrastructure changes, mentor engineers, document architectural decisions, and establish strong operational practices.
Required Skills & Experience:
- AWS & Infrastructure as Code
- Extensive experience designing, building, and operating production AWS environments.
- Advanced Terraform and HCL proficiency, including reusable modules, state management, imports, and safe infrastructure changes.
- Strong knowledge of IAM, VPC networking, DNS, TLS, load balancing, encryption, and AWS security services.
Kubernetes & Container Infrastructure:
- Strong production experience with Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, and Docker.
- Experience managing cluster networking, upgrades, autoscaling, workloads, resource allocation, and storage.
- Familiarity with Helm, Kustomize, Argo CD, or similar deployment tools.
- Experience supporting containerized applications in distributed production environments.
- DevSecOps & Security Engineering
- Demonstrated experience securing cloud infrastructure and software delivery pipelines.
- Strong understanding of least-privilege IAM, Kubernetes RBAC, workload identity, secrets management, and network segmentation.
- Experience implementing vulnerability scanning, dependency security, container security, and infrastructure security controls.
- Knowledge of software supply-chain security, credential management, and secure deployment practices.
CI/CD & Automation:
Experience building and maintaining complex CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, CircleCI, or comparable platforms.
Understanding of GitOps, container registries, reproducible builds, and automated release management.
Strong proficiency in Python and Bash for infrastructure automation and operational tooling.
Working proficiency with TypeScript/JavaScript.
Confidence working with HCL, YAML, JSON, and Dockerfiles.
Linux, Networking & Reliability:
Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting skills.
Deep understanding of DNS, TLS, HTTP, WebSockets, routing, and network connectivity.
Experience diagnosing performance issues across distributed systems.
Familiarity with PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, and managed AWS database services.
Experience with monitoring, logging, incident response, and disaster recovery.
Ability to define service-level objectives and improve system reliability through measurable outcomes.
Technical Leadership:
Proven ability to independently own production infrastructure and deliver substantial technical improvements.
Experience leading incident investigations and implementing long-term corrective actions.
Especially Valuable Experience
Kubernetes & Cloud Infrastructure:
- Argo CD Application
- Sets, Karpenter, KEDA, Helm, and Kustomize.
- AWS VPC CNI, Cilium/Hubble, ExternalDNS, and cert-manager.
- AWS Load Balancer Controller, Global Accelerator, and EBS CSI.Cloud Security & Identity
- GitHub OIDC federation.
- EKS Pod Identity and IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA).External Secrets Operator.
- Cloud-native security scanning and vulnerability remediation.
- Secure software supply chains and container image provenance.
Developer Infrastructure:
GitHub Actions Runner Controller and ephemeral runners.
Multi-architecture ARM64/Graviton container builds.
Container registry optimization and automated release workflows.
Application & Data OperationsSST/OpenNext, AWS Lambda, and ECS.Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis, and MongoDB.Database migrations, connection pooling, backup restoration, and failover testing.
Python and Node.js runtime upgrades.
Observability & Real-Time Systems:
CloudWatch, Container Insights, Fluent Bit, and distributed tracing.
Real-time voice, telephony, streaming media, or other latency-sensitive systems.
Long-lived WebSocket connections and workload scaling.
High-availability systems with external provider dependencies.
What Success Looks Like:
Our AWS infrastructure is secure, reproducible, scalable, and managed through infrastructure as code.
Engineering teams can deploy software quickly and confidently through reliable, automated pipelines.
Infrastructure and application security are integrated into everyday engineering workflows.
Production services maintain high availability, predictable performance, and strong operational visibility.
Our real-time voice infrastructure supports increasing call volumes without compromising latency or reliability.
Security vulnerabilities are identified, prioritized, remediated, and verified.
Backup restoration, failover, and disaster recovery procedures are documented and tested.
Cloud infrastructure operates efficiently with strong cost visibility and resource management.
Engineers have the tooling, documentation, and processes needed to deploy and operate systems independently.
IF THAT SOUNDS SOUNDS LIKE YOU, LET'S TALK!