DevOps Engineer

Rite Soccer is a global football-only social platform preparing for launch. We are looking for a part-time DevOps Engineer who keeps Rite Soccer fast, reliable, and alive when thousands of users are watching live academy streams, gifting players, or blowing up clips at the same time. This is a true founding-team role: you build the production infrastructure from the ground up, prevent disasters before they happen, and scale us from hundreds to millions of concurrent users. Success in this role looks like: Zero downtime during any major live-stream weekend

Ability to push new features multiple times per day without breaking anything

Cloud costs stay under control while handling 10× traffic spikes

The whole team (and eventually users) never worries "is the app going to crash tonight?"

This role reports directly to the Founder and is the backbone that lets a tiny team move fast and ship fearless updates.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and maintain production Kubernetes clusters (EKS or GKE) with proper autoscaling (HPA, VPA, Cluster Autoscaler)

Build and own CI/CD pipelines using GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Helm, and Terraform so deployments are one-click and zero-downtime

Set up observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, CloudWatch) with meaningful alerts

Secure the platform (RBAC, Trivy scans, secret management, rate limiting, anti-abuse for gifts/payouts)

Optimize cloud costs and performance (spot instances, reserved capacity, CDN for video)

Ensure infrastructure security using best practices (IAM, network rules, secrets management).

Support live-video streaming needs (RTMP ingestion, low-latency delivery, failover)

Be on-call for incidents and able to push hotfixes within hours

Document everything so future engineers can onboard quickly

Collaborate daily with the founder and mobile engineer via Slack and short standups

Qualifications

• 4+ years hands-on DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering experience
   in real production environments
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
   — or equivalent real-world Kubernetes battle experience
• Deep expertise deploying and managing 
  Kubernetes clusters
   (EKS, GKE, K3s, or Kubeadm)
• Strong proficiency with 
  Infrastructure as Code
   tools — 
  Terraform
  , CloudFormation, and 
  Helm
• Practical experience with 
  GitOps pipelines
   (ArgoCD, Flux) and modern CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI)
• Proven track record 
  running containerized applications at scale
   and managing traffic spikes in real time
• Strong scripting ability in 
  Bash
  , 
  Python
  , or 
  Go
   for automation and tooling
• Solid understanding of 
  Linux systems administration
   and cloud platforms (AWS preferred; GCP acceptable)
• Experience troubleshooting 
  live production incidents under pressure
• Strong communication skills, organized execution, and ability to work independently in a fast-moving startup
• Genuine interest in football
   — understanding why peak match times (e.g., Saturday 3PM GMT) matter for infrastructure load

Nice to Have

• Experience with 
  live-video streaming
  , 
  RTMP
  , or real-time media pipelines
• Familiarity with 
  cost optimization
   in AWS/GCP for early-stage startups
• Experience with monitoring & observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic, CloudWatch)
• Exposure to microservices environments , Python, Go)
• Contributions to open-source DevOps, SRE, or Kubernetes tooling (public GitHub, blogs, etc.)
• Prior work with high-growth consumer apps, gaming, or social platforms

Compensation

• Deferred salary:
   $90,000–$110,000/year (salary activates once the company reaches 
  $50K MRR
   or upon closing a major funding round — whichever comes first)
• Equity:
   
  2% founder-level equity
  , with 
  4-year vesting
   and a 
  1-year cliff
• Part-time to full-time path:
   Begin at 
  20–25 hours/week
  , converting to 
  full-time
   automatically when salary activates
• Performance equity bonuses:
   Additional 
  0.25–0.5%
   available for meeting key milestones (e.g., infrastructure scaling, uptime SLAs, cost optimization improvements)
• Founder-level role:
   Strategic position with ownership, autonomy, and long-term impact