SRE / DevOps Lead

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 lead a team of 2 SREs 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.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of 2 SREs, 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.

Requirements

• 7+ 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.
• Working knowledge of identity and endpoint tooling (Okta, Google Workspace, Jamf or Kandji) - enough to set direction for the IT side of the role.
• Clear written and spoken English; comfortable collaborating with our NYC team across time zones.
• Bonus points
• IRS e-file ecosystem, FTI handling, or fintech-grade data residency experience.
• Experience preparing infrastructure for a certification milestone (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI, SOC1, STIG).
• FinOps / cloud cost management experience.
• Database operations at scale (Postgres, Spanner, or similar).
• Experience standing up or scaling an IT function at a high-growth startup.
• 3+ years of experience as a software engineer - Advantage!
• How we work
• Mission first. Every decision ties back to building a smarter, simpler tax experience.
• Team over ego. We value contribution over credit and bring others along.
• Win with determination. We pursue outcomes others assume are impossible - and we iterate until we get there.
• About april

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