DevOps Tech Lead Manager

Aplazo’s mission is to empower financial access, opportunity, and freedom by connecting people and businesses in Latin America through fair, simple, and transparent financial solutions.

We are looking for a DevOps Tech Lead Manager to lead our DevOps squad — the team that keeps Aplazo’s core infrastructure reliable, scalable, and secure. This is a first-line people management role: you will own the squad’s delivery, quality, and on-call, while staying hands-on as an engineer 40–60% of your time. You are as comfortable running a 1:1 or writing a performance review as you are debugging a production incident or reviewing a Terraform change.

You are the person your squad trusts to remove blockers, tell them the truth (good or bad), and connect their day-to-day work to why it matters for Aplazo’s business.

What you’ll work on

• Managing and growing a squad of 4–8 DevOps engineers (E1 through E3)
• Owning your squad’s delivery commitments, code/infra quality, and on-call rotation
• Staying hands-on with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and observability work alongside your team
• Running 1:1s, writing performance reviews, and coaching career growth for your reports
• Hiring and onboarding new engineers into the squad
• Owning squad-level incidents and post-mortems, escalating proactively when needed
• Tying the squad’s work to business OKRs/KPIs and representing the squad in planning and cross-team syncs

Key responsibilities

People & Team Development

• Hire and onboard engineers through E3; run regular 1:1s and write performance reviews
• Coach career growth for each report, with concrete development plans
• Build psychological safety and ownership in the squad so problems surface early, not in production
• Stay technically sharp enough to earn the squad’s trust as an engineer, not just a manager
• Act as a Culture & Values champion for the squad

Get Stuff Done

• Ensure the squad delivers on its commitments at a predictable velocity and measurable quality
• Own squad-level incidents and postmortems; escalate proactively rather than let issues fester
• Remove process, tooling, and tech-debt blockers instead of just escalating them
• Stay hands-on (40–60%) with IaC, CI/CD pipelines, observability (Datadog), and cloud cost optimization

Business Impact

• Keep the squad’s work clearly tied to business OKRs and/or KPIs
• Proactively propose business value (OKRs/KPIs) — be a protagonist, not just an executor
• Give the squad a sense of purpose; explain why the work matters to the business
• Identify trade-offs that balance delivery speed against regulatory constraints (CNBV, Condusef, etc.)

Communication & Leadership

• Communicate clearly and kindly with reports, peers, and your own leader — including surfacing bad news early
• Communicate risk and trade-offs clearly and as publicly as possible to all stakeholders
• Represent the squad in planning, grooming, and cross-team syncs, recognizing individual contributions
• Know when to ask for help and when to escalate
• Give feedback that helps people improve, not feedback that just gets delivered
• Translate external and business pressure into clear priorities the squad can act on

What we’re looking for

Required experience

• 3+ years in DevOps, Platform, or Infrastructure Engineering with production ownership
• Prior experience leading a team formally (as a manager) or informally (as a tech lead) — hiring, mentoring, or running incident response for others
• Track record of owning delivery for a team, not just individual tickets
• Comfort operating as a working manager: 40–60% hands-on IC work alongside people management

Technical skills

• Strong expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation)
• Deep knowledge of CI/CD systems and modern delivery practices (trunk-based development, feature flags, incremental rollouts)
• Hands-on experience with AWS (Fargate, ECS, EC2, RDS/Postgres, ElastiCache, Lambda, SQS, Kinesis)
• Proficiency with observability tools – metrics, logs, traces, alerting (Datadog preferred)
• Comfortable with scripting/automation in Python, Bash, or Node.js/TypeScript
• Solid understanding of cloud security practices, secret management, and compliance requirements

People & management skills

• Experience running 1:1s, giving structured feedback, and writing performance reviews
• Ability to hire and onboard engineers, and to coach career growth across levels (E1–E3)
• Builds psychological safety — team members raise problems early rather than hide them
• Comfortable making people decisions (hiring, performance, growth plans) with fairness and empathy

Soft skills

• Strong communicator: direct, clear, and comfortable surfacing bad news to reports, peers, and leadership — in Spanish, with working English for vendor/partner interactions
• Manages ambiguity well: adjusts to changing priorities, makes conscious trade-offs, and proposes best practices from scratch when needed
• Favors people over rigid process (Agile mindset) but takes workflow hygiene seriously (well-defined stories, estimation, clean PRs)
• Growth mindset: seeks feedback, mentors others, and continuously improves own craft

Nice to have

• Familiarity with GCP services (BigQuery, Pub/Sub)
• Experience with MongoDB Atlas or other managed data stores
• Exposure to fintech, payments, or regulated environments (CNBV, SOC 2, PCI)
• Experience creating or improving on-call and incident response processes
• Prior formal people-management experience (title of Manager, EM, or Team Lead)
• Knowledge of DORA metrics and using them to drive team improvement

What success looks like

• Your squad delivers on its commitments at a predictable, measurable velocity and quality
• Incidents are owned end-to-end — proactive escalation, thorough post-mortems, and fewer repeat issues
• Your reports grow faster because of your coaching, 1:1s, and honest feedback
• The squad’s work is visibly tied to business OKRs/KPIs, and stakeholders trust your read on trade-offs
• Problems surface early because your squad feels safe raising them

Why join us

• Lead a squad building the infrastructure that powers financial inclusion across Latin America
• Stay hands-on as an engineer while growing your people-leadership craft
• Work in a high-growth fintech at the intersection of infrastructure, delivery, and real business impact
• A team with deep roots in product, technology, and culture-focused companies.