SRE / DevOps Lead

About the role

About the role

As april's SRE / DevOps Lead, you'll own the reliability, scalability, and security of the infrastructure that powers our platform — a system trusted by leading wealth managers, banks, and consumer fintechs to handle some of the most sensitive financial data their users have. You'll work HO (80%) and lead a team of 1 SRE and 1 ITSecOps (20%) and partner closely with product engineering, security, and our compliance partners to make sure what we build runs the way our customers (and the IRS) expect.

This is a hands-on lead role. You'll set the technical direction for our cloud platform, deployment pipelines, observability, and on-call practices — and you'll write the code, configs, and runbooks that get us there. You'll also own april's IT function (identity, endpoints, SaaS) at a tighter scope, keeping the company secure and productive as we grow.

What you'll do

- Lead and grow a team of 1 SRE and 1 ITSecOps, setting direction across SRE, DevOps, and IT

- Own the architecture, performance, and reliability of april's GCP-based platform — Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, networking, and scale

- Define and uphold our SLOs, infra budgets, on-call priorities, and incident response practice

- Build and operate our observability stack so engineers can find and fix problems before customers feel them

- Partner with engineering and security on the controls, evidence, and audits that keep us SOC 2, SOC1 and STIG compliant and IRS-authorized

- Plan and execute capacity, load testing, and game days for tax season — the highest-stakes window of our year

- Own corporate IT: identity (Okta), Google Workspace, endpoint management (Jamf / Kandji), and the SaaS stack used across the company

- Set the standard for how we ship: fast, safe, observable, and reversible

What you'll bring

- 6+ years of SRE / DevOps / Platform Engineering experience, including 1y+ leading or managing engineers

- Deep, hands-on experience running production workloads on GCP — Kubernetes (GKE) and Terraform at real scale, not just consumed off-the-shelf

- Strong programming or scripting fundamentals (Go, Python, or similar) and a track record of automating processes

- Experience operating in a SOC 2 environment and supporting external audits; comfort working alongside compliance and security partners

- Experience with regulated workloads (IRS, financial services, healthcare, or similar) — or a clear, demonstrated desire to go deep on what that means

- Strong observability instincts: you've built dashboards, alerts, and SLOs in Datadog (or equivalent) that engineers actually rely on

- Calm, clear leadership during incidents — and a coaching mindset for your team between them

- Clear written and spoken English; comfortable collaborating with our NYC team across time zones

Bonus points