Senior DevOps Engineer

Location: Ames, IA / Hybrid Hours/ Work Status: Full Time / Exempt

We believe an athletic director’s job is one of the most critical in a community: to shape the lives and experiences of student-athletes. But as we listened, we learned that with dwindling budgets and growing responsibilities, they’ve had no choice but to spend more time managing logistics than leading their teams and programs. After countless conversations, we gained a deep understanding of their challenges, from handling transactions to managing schedules and tracking results.

This insight was the catalyst for Bound. We created an all-in-one platform to give ADs back their time. With our One Schedule Technology at its core, our platform integrates essential tools like Activity Registration, Tickets and Passes, and 20+ additional solutions. Today, Bound empowers schools across the country to manage every aspect of their athletics and activities, all within a single, unified solution.

We’re not just a software company; we are a team made up of former athletic directors, administrators, coaches, parents, and fans. We all share one core belief: in the power of youth sports and activities to positively impact communities and the people who live in them.

As a member of our engineering team, you’ll play a key role in building, operating, and scaling the infrastructure that powers the Bound platform. With Bound entering an exciting phase of growth, your work will directly support platform reliability, developer velocity, and long-term scalability. You’ll own and evolve our AWS infrastructure and Kubernetes (EKS) environment using modern Dev Ops practices like Infrastructure as Code and Git Ops.

This role is hands‑on and impactful—you’ll work closely with product engineers to ensure the platform is secure, observable, and easy to operate. As Bound continues to scale, a flexible mindset and willingness to occasionally assist with support or operational initiatives will be especially valuable.

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Operations

• Design, maintain, and evolve Bound’s AWS infrastructure to be secure, scalable, and cost‑effective.
• Own and operate Kubernetes (EKS) clusters, ensuring high availability, performance, and reliability.
• Manage networking, IAM, security groups, load balancing, and other AWS‑native services.

Project Support

• Define and maintain infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code tools, with a focus on cdk8s.
• Implement and maintain Git Ops workflows for Kubernetes and infrastructure changes.
• Ensure all infrastructure changes are version‑controlled, reviewed, and auditable.

Reliability, SLOs & Incident Response

• Define, measure, and evolve Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and related SLIs to ensure platform reliability aligns with business expectations.
• Build and maintain monitoring, logging, and alerting to support SLOs and proactive issue detection.
• Participate in a shared on‑call rotation to respond to incidents and ensure timely resolution.
• Lead or contribute to incident reviews and postmortems, focusing on root cause analysis and long‑term fixes.
• Partner with engineering teams to improve resiliency, reduce toil, and protect error budgets.
• Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines to support safe, fast, and repeatable deployments.
• Work closely with application engineers to streamline local development, deployment, and operational workflows.
• Help define operational standards and best practices across teams.
• Partner with engineers, product, and stakeholders to align infrastructure and reliability decisions with business goals.
• Clearly communicate incidents, risks, and reliability tradeoffs to technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Advocate for reliability‑focused engineering practices across the organization.

• Extensive, hands‑on experience with AWS, including services such as EC2, VPC, IAM, RDS, S3, ELB/ALB, and Cloud Watch
• Strong production experience operating Kubernetes, with a focus on Amazon EKS
• Experience defining and operating systems against SLOs / SLIs
• Experience participating in on‑call rotations and incident response for production systems
• Proven experience running and…