Senior DevOps & Infrastructure Lead

About The Role

RV LIFE is looking for a Senior DevOps & Infrastructure Lead to help us stabilize, document, and modernize the infrastructure behind our products. This is a hands-on senior role for someone comfortable inheriting real production systems, reducing operational risk, improving reliability, and moving us toward a documented, secure, automated, infrastructure-as-code operating model. We run production across DigitalOcean, AWS, Cloudflare, and other hosting providers, and are consolidating onto managed, infrastructure-as-code platforms. We need deep, hands-on expertise across these environments.

What You'll Do

• Administer and improve existing DigitalOcean infrastructure.
• Support and improve Linux-based production server environments.
• Migrate self-managed databases onto managed database services, with validated failover, backups, and recovery.
• Move applications onto managed runtimes (including Laravel Cloud where it fits), replacing manual deploy processes with automated, repeatable pipelines.
• Expand and harden our use of Cloudflare for edge, static hosting, caching, and security.
• Create and maintain practical runbooks for common and emergency infrastructure workflows.
• Improve incident response, escalation paths, monitoring, logging, and alerting.
• Review and improve backup, restore, and disaster-recovery procedures.
• Identify recurring manual work and convert it into safer procedures, scripts, automation, or infrastructure-as-code.
• Help define infrastructure-as-code standards and move appropriate infrastructure into repeatable, version-controlled workflows.
• Work with AWS services where needed (Lambda, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, S3, SSM/Secrets Manager, queues).
• Use AI tools to accelerate discovery, documentation, scripting, troubleshooting, and automation, with strong production-safety judgment.
• Partner with engineering leadership to prioritize infrastructure risk and modernization; track work clearly in Jira/GitHub and communicate proactively about risks, tradeoffs, and blockers.

What Success Looks Like

• In the first 30-60 days, you'll take ownership of how we see and operate our infrastructure, building on what we already track and closing the gaps.
• You'll Validate And Take Ownership Of What Already Exists:
• Our infrastructure inventory and server map
• Our monitoring and alerting
• Our DNS / Cloudflare configuration
• Our prioritized infrastructure risk register
• You'll Create What We're Missing:
• An access and credential map
• Verified backup and restore status for critical systems (tested, not assumed)
• Runbooks for the highest-risk operational workflows
• In the first 90 days, you'll move us toward a durable, consolidated model.
• Success means:
• The first core database migrated to a managed service, with a tested restore, plus a clear, sequenced plan for the rest.
• The first application running on a managed runtime (App Platform or Laravel Cloud).
• The first static frontend served from Cloudflare Pages.
• A measurably stronger edge security posture.
• Critical systems no longer understood by only one person; common tasks have documented procedures; manual processes are being converted to automation; AI is used safely to reduce toil.

Who You Are

• Takes ownership without waiting to be told every next step.
• Is calm and practical during incidents.
• Can inherit messy systems without being judgmental or reckless.
• Prefers consolidating on platforms we already run over adding new vendors.
• Documents as you go.
• Uses AI as leverage, but does not blindly trust its output; you verify, test, and apply senior judgment before anything touches production.
• Knows when to automate and when to stabilize first.
• Communicates clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Understands that reliability is not just uptime: it is visibility, repeatability, recovery, and shared understanding.
• Wants to leave infrastructure better than you found it.