Site Reliability Engineer

Overview

Grain makes it possible to pay with stable coins anywhere that accepts regular payments. Users pay from their own crypto wallets; merchants receive dollars through regulated banking partners. We never hold customer funds.

Under the hood, we coordinate wallet orchestration, transaction validation, compliance controls, and fiat settlement — bridging crypto-native value with real-world commerce.

We closed our seed round led by Polychain Capital and are focused on scaling infrastructure that meets the security and reliability standards payments demand.

You ll be our first dedicated Dev Ops hire. Our platform is processing real transactions today, and we need to harden our infrastructure for SOC 2 compliance, improve observability, and build the operational foundation for scale — all without killing the velocity of a small, focused team.

This is a build-it-right-from-the-start role, not a fix-the-legacy-mess role. You ll have real ownership over our infrastructure philosophy, security posture, and operational practices.

What you ll own:

• Observability & reliability — Build comprehensive logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting. Make production systems resilient against outages, misconfigurations, and security threats.
• Security & compliance — Establish SOC 2-compliant access controls, secrets management, and audit logging. Design and implement zero-trust architecture across services and APIs.
• CI/CD & release management — Build pipelines with automated testing, staged rollouts, and rollback capabilities. Improve deployment velocity without sacrificing safety.
• Infrastructure-as-code — Manage and evolve our AWS infrastructure through CDK, ensuring reproducibility and auditability.
• Cost & performance — Drive cost optimization as we scale, without compromising reliability.
• Developer experience — Partner with engineering to make deploying, debugging, and operating services as smooth as possible.

Required:

• 4+ years in Dev Ops or infrastructure engineering
• Production experience with AWS CDK (or Terraform/Pulumi — but CDK is what we use)
• Hands-on Kubernetes in production (EKS strongly preferred)
• Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines serving real users
• Implemented observability solutions end-to-end (not just installed Datadog)
• Solid understanding of security best practices, particularly in financial or payments contexts
• You've operated systems where downtime has real consequences — not just dashboards, but pagers

Strong Plus:

• Experience with SOC 2, PCI-DSS, or similar compliance frameworks
• Background in fintech, payments, or financial services infrastructure
• Knowledge of zero-trust architecture and implementation
• Experience with blockchain or crypto infrastructure

• Cloud: AWS (CDK for IaC)
• Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS)
• Compute: ECS, Lambda, EC2
• CI/CD: Git Hub Actions (open to your recommendations)
• Observability: Building this out — you ll have significant input here