DevOps & Security Specialist

Kite - DevOps & Security Specialist (IC)

Location: India or Indonesia

Type: Full-time | Early Team

About Kite

Kite is a global neobank reimagining cross-border finance stating with South East Asia. Kite provides dollar account, debit card and secure wallet for fast & compliant payments with near-zero fees & without the usual friction, hidden FX costs, or confusing flows.

About the Role

This is a hands-on individual contributor role owning reliability first (SRE/DevOps) to stabilise environments and deployments, then shifting quickly into security hardening before go-live.

Role & Responsibilities

Reliability & DevOps

1. Own production infrastructure on GCP and Kubernetes (GKE): cluster setup, networking, RBAC, upgrades, scaling, and runtime security.
2. Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) for backend + web + mobile release workflows (working with engineering on iOS/Android release needs).
3. Set up observability end-to-end: metrics (Prometheus), dashboards (Grafana), logs/traces (GCP), alerting, and meaningful SLOs.
4. Establish incident response basics: alert routing (Slack + Zenduty), runbooks, postmortems, and reliability improvements.
5. Set budget guardrails and alerts, autoscaling policies, rightsizing cadence, and cost dashboards to keep infra efficient as we scale.
6. Own operational setup for:

• Postgres (Cloud SQL or AlloyDB), Redis/Memorystore, and messaging (Pub/Sub/Kafka) where applicable
• Backups, restores, and environment hygiene
• Define and track RPO/RTO and disaster recovery practices

Security

1. Implement security fundamentals: least-privilege IAM, secret management, environment isolation, audit logging, vulnerability scanning, patching cadence.
2. Secure production access: strong RBAC, break-glass processes, and operational controls.
3. Build security posture aligned toward SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / PCI DSS readiness (pragmatic controls and evidence collection).
4. Help enforce secure release processes (signing keys, build integrity, secrets handling in pipelines).
5. Partner with mobile engineers to ensure:

• Jailbreak/root detection
• Certificate pinning
• Device integrity (e.g., Play Integrity / App Attest)

Qualifications

• 5 - 8+ years in DevOps/SRE/SecOps with production ownership.
• Strong experience with GCP and Kubernetes (GKE preferred): networking, RBAC, ingress, scaling, upgrades.
• Hands-on with GitHub Actions and CI/CD best practices (build/test/deploy gates, rollbacks, release hygiene).
• Observability expertise: Cloud Monitoring/Logging/Trace + Prometheus/Grafana, alert design, and incident response.
• Ability to define SLOs/SLAs, benchmark systems, and operationalize monitoring.
• Experience running managed data services (Postgres, Redis, queues/streams) and owning reliability + backups.
• Security fundamentals: IAM, secrets, vulnerability management, secure configs, auditability.
• Comfortable being on-call in India/Indonesia timezones and driving incidents to resolution.
• Startup mindset: high ownership, speed, and good judgment under ambiguity.

Nice to have

• Experience moving toward SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / PCI DSS controls (even without formal certification).
• Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred), policy-as-code.
• WAF/DDoS controls, runtime/container security tooling, supply-chain security (SBOM, signing).
• Mobile security implementation experience (not just requirements).

Top KPIs you’ll own

• Reliability: uptime, error rates, MTTR, incident frequency, change failure rate.
• Delivery velocity: deployment frequency, lead time to production, rollback time.
• Observability maturity: coverage of critical services, alert quality (low noise), dashboard adoption.
• Security readiness: time-to-patch, vuln burn-down, access control hygiene, audit log coverage.
• Data resiliency: backup success rate, restore drills, defined/achieved RPO/RTO.
• Cost efficiency: spend vs budget, scaling efficiency, rightsizing outcomes.

Compensation and benefits are aligned with the best industry standards