DevOps Engineer ace in AWS | Kubernetes | SOC 2 – Hybrid Algarve, Portugal
We're excited to help our client Aiera.com, a fast-growing, well-funded American startup in the financial research technology industry, to build their team in the Algarve.
Overview
Aiera develops a next-generation financial research platform, including its own AI models tailored to financial markets, used by institutional investors and financial professionals globally.
As one of the first DevOps Engineers in Portugal, you'll help shape the infrastructure, reliability, and DevSecOps practices for a real-time, AI-powered platform. You will be working directly with the Engineering team in the US.
This is a hybrid role based around Loulé / Faro, Algarve (2–3 days per week at the office).
Competitive compensation in the range of €40,000 – €50,000 gross annual, plus relocation support for candidates within Europe to make the move to the Algarve to enjoy a Mediterranean lifestyle along with an innovative career in financial research intelligence.
Why This Opportunity Stands Out
* Impactful work: Own critical parts of Aiera's cloud infrastructure, security, and reliability in a highly regulated industry.
* Modern stack: Deep hands-on work with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and ML/AI workloads.
* Strong engineering culture: Collaborate directly with senior engineers and leadership in the US, with low bureaucracy and high autonomy.
* Lifestyle + career: Combine a competitive salary with the chance to live and work in the Algarve, one of Europe's most attractive regions.
* Founding hub team: Be part of building Aiera's first European engineering hub, with influence on process, tooling, and culture.
What You'll Work On
As a DevOps Engineer, you will:
* Design, build, and maintain cloud infrastructure on AWS to support real-time data, APIs, and AI workloads.
* Manage Kubernetes-based environments (e.g. EKS), ensuring scalability, resilience, and efficient resource usage.
* Implement and evolve CI/CD pipelines to support frequent, safe deployments across multiple services.
* Design, develop, and maintain MLOps for language models:
* Model training and evaluation pipelines
* Versioning, packaging, and deployment of models
* Monitoring performance and resource usage
* Own security, compliance & reliability aspects of the platform:
* Work within frameworks like SOC 2 and similar standards
* Implement best practices in IAM, secrets management, network security, and logging
* Support audits and continuous compliance automation where possible
* Monitor and optimize system performance, quickly identify bottlenecks, and recommend improvements.
* Collaborate with backend and AI engineers to ensure systems are secure, observable, and scalable from day one.
Who We're Looking For
Must-have qualifications
* 5+ years of professional experience in DevOps / Site Reliability / Platform Engineering roles.
* Deep, hands-on experience with AWS (e.g., EC2, EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch).
* Solid experience with Kubernetes in production (cluster operations, deployments, observability, scaling).
* Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code, ideally Terraform.
* Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar).
* Proven experience with security and compliance, preferably in SOC 2 or other regulated environments (finance, healthcare, etc.).
* Strong understanding of monitoring, logging, and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, CloudWatch, etc.).
* Professional proficiency in English (written and spoken).
* Strong communication and collaboration skills with stakeholders that are remote and across different timezones.
* Ability and willingness to work 2–3 days/week in the office in the Greater Faro / Loulé area.
Nice-to-have
* Experience with MLOps: ML pipelines, model deployment, inference services, and related tooling.
* Exposure to Python-based systems and microservices.
* Experience in financial technology, market data, or other high-availability data systems.
* Background with compliance automation (policy as code, audit trails, security scanners).
* Experience with international startup teams in a hybrid work setup.
How You Work (About You)
We're selective in our hiring and look for engineers whose mindset matches Aiera's culture:
* Driven by curiosity and a desire to create real, lasting value for customers.
* Take pride in building tools and systems where every detail matters.
* Committed to creating clean, maintainable, and well-documented infrastructure and automation.
* Thrive in a collaborative environment with minimal bureaucracy and lots of ownership.
* Comfortable wearing multiple hats and learning new technologies as needed.
* Understand that startups sometimes require flexibility in work hours and responsibilities.
* Value initiative and getting things done over rigid process.
* Communicate clearly, with empathy and a teaching mindset, helping align and mobilize the team.
Location & relocation
We will only consider candidates who are willing to live in the Algarve and be on-site. We will consider and support candidates who are:
* Already based in Portugal and seeking an international engineering environment
* EU / EEA / Swiss / Brazilian citizens (or otherwise with the right to work in Portugal without sponsorship)
* Already in Europe, but need sponsoring to prolong their work permit / visa in Europe.
If you're energized by joining a mission-driven team, working on transformative AI & data infrastructure, and helping build an industry-leading platform from the Algarve, we'd love to hear from you.