Lead Cloud Engineer

About Zeal

Zeal is addressing the critical challenge of untapped transactional data. At the moment, whenever a transaction is processed on a POS terminal (payment card machine), physical retailers have no idea who the paying customer is, unless they use a loyalty program. Think of when you go to a supermarket and you pay by card, unless you go to a supermarket that has a loyalty program and you get your loyalty card out, the POS terminal doesn't tell the retailer if you're a new or returning customer, demographics, gender, etc. Unlike e-ecommerce, in physical retail customer identification always had to be a separate step because the payment terminal is not built to self-identify the paying customer. Hence, a plethora of valuable data is lost or underutilized. With Zeal’s advanced Smart POS plugin, the company integrates with POS terminals globally to provide payment acquirers and ISVs with a unique differentiator for their POS terminals. The merchants of our partners benefit from world-class data, analytics & tools to predict consumer behavior using Artificial Intelligence, enabling merchants to unlock the full potential of transactional data.

About the Role

We’re on the lookout for a Lead Cloud Engineer to take ownership of our cloud infrastructure strategy, lead DevOps and SRE practices, and mentor a growing team of infrastructure engineers. This role is ideal for someone with deep AWS expertise, a builder’s mindset, and the ability to design scalable and secure systems in a high-growth environment.

You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leadership and product teams to ensure our systems are performant, resilient, and cost-effective—while also driving a culture of automation, observability, and operational excellence across squads.

Your Main Responsibilities Are to:

• Lead the design, implementation, and maintenance of secure, scalable, and highly available cloud infrastructure.
• Guide a team of DevOps, SRE, and cloud engineers, fostering a culture of reliability, innovation, and accountability.
• Establish and evolve CI/CD pipelines, using GitHub Actions or similar tooling.
• Drive incident management processes, from on-call rotations and root cause analysis to clear documentation and postmortems.
• Architect and implement microservices, event-driven infrastructure (e.g., Kafka), and cloud-native patterns to support platform scalability.
• Define and manage infrastructure as code using tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Champion observability practices, using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and CloudWatch to monitor performance and system health.
• Ensure compliance with cloud governance and operational security policies (e.g., IAM controls, network security).
• Work cross-functionally with engineering, security, and product teams to align infrastructure with product roadmaps.

The Ideal Candidate Should Have:

• 6–10 years of hands-on experience in DevOps, SRE, or Cloud Engineering roles.
• At least 1 year in a leadership or staff-level role, with proven experience mentoring and leading technical teams.
• Deep experience with AWS and its core services (EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, EKS, VPC, CloudWatch).
• Strong expertise with Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration.
• Proficiency in infrastructure as code, using Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions or similar.
• Experience with monitoring and logging tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK stack.
• Solid grasp of Linux systems, networking fundamentals, and bash scripting.
• Excellent documentation and communication skills, with fluency in English (spoken and written).

Nice to Haves:

• Experience with Kafka and building event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as SOC2 or ISO 27001.
• Experience with multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure environments.
• Background in building internal developer platforms or self-service tooling for engineering teams.
• Exposure to SRE principles (e.g., SLAs/SLOs, error budgets, toil reduction).
• Knowledge of cloud cost optimization strategies and budgeting practices.

What You’ll Love About Us:

• 💻 Work from Anywhere: Enjoy the flexibility of remote work or join us in a hybrid setup. Your choice, your comfort.
• 💰 Competitive Compensation: We value your talent and offer packages that reflect it.
• 🤝 Collaborative Culture: Join a team where trust, transparency, and continuous learning are at the heart of everything we do.
• 💡 Make an Impact: Have ideas to make things better? Awesome. We’re all ears and ready to innovate.
• 🚀 Shape the Future of Fintech: Work on cutting-edge fintech solutions that impact thousands of users.