DevOps Tech Lead Manager

About the role
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 obse