DevOps / Platform Engineer (Contract)

About the job Location Fully Remote, open to international candidates Compensation: $2,500 – $3,500 USD/month Hard requirement: You must be available during US business hours, 9am to 5pm Central Time (CST/CDT), on weekdays. --- About Us Contrarian Thinking is building the infrastructure layer for modern entrepreneurs. We already have attention. Now we're turning it into software. The goal: Take someone from "I want to buy/build a business" → "I did it" faster than anyone else. Role We're hiring a platform engineer who automates themselves out of every problem. You own the infrastructure everything else runs on: the systems that keep our products online and control who can access what. When they go down, paying members can't get in, so reliability is the job, not a nice-to-have. Most of your day is self-directed. You decide what to automate, what to harden, and what to tear out. You write infrastructure as code, not console clicks, and you pick the right deployment model per service instead of forcing everything into one pattern. A manual task you've done twice is a bug. When something pages you, you fix it, then make sure it never pages anyone for that reason again. When you engage with leadership, it's to align, not to ask: you bring context, a recommendation, and the few decisions that actually need a human. You're also the connective tissue on infrastructure: you review the changes going into production, catch the security hole in a PR before it ships, and when something won't scale, you don't just flag it. You open the repo and fix it. What You'll Do Own CI/CD end-to-end in GitHub Actions: automated deploys, plus test coverage gates, container and dependency vulnerability scanning, and versioned, traceable builds Manage all GCP infrastructure as code with Terraform: reusable modules, remote state with locking, and bringing existing infrastructure under code (no manual console changes) Build, ship, and run containerized services with Docker across Cloud Run, Kubernetes (GKE Autopilot), and VMs, choosing the right target per service Own the reliability of our data stores: provisioning, backups, performance, and safe migrations Own platform security: secrets management, least-privilege IAM and workload identity, API key and access controls, and keeping vulnerabilities out of the pipeline Configure and maintain Auth0 for identity and login Build observability: monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting (GCP Monitoring, OpenTelemetry) so we catch issues before members do Own incident response and on-call through PagerDuty, and run blameless postmortems so the same thing never takes us down twice Keep the platform reliable and available: it's what our products and members depend on Right-size infrastructure for cost and performance as we scale Tech Environment Cloud & Data: GCP, BigQuery, PostgreSQL Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (reusable modules, remote state with locking) Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Cloud Run, Kubernetes (GKE Autopilot), Compute Engine VMs CI/CD: GitHub Actions (deploys, test coverage, container and dependency scanning) Identity & Security: Auth0, Secret Manager, Workload Identity, IAP, IAM Monitoring & On-Call: GCP Monitoring/Logging, OpenTelemetry, PagerDuty Data Pipelines: Fivetran, N8N (or comparable) CRM & Ops: HubSpot Apps you support: Python and Node.js services, with React/Next.js and PHP/Laravel frontends Tooling: AI-assisted dev (e.g. Claude, Cursor or similar) Note: Experience with this exact stack is a strong advantage, not a hard requirement. Different services run on different infrastructure, and you'll work across all of it. What We're Looking For 8+ years owning production infrastructure, not just touching it Fluent in Terraform or another infrastructure-as-code tool, including modules and remote state Comfortable with Docker, and you know when to reach for Cloud Run vs. Kubernetes vs. a VM Strong security instincts: secrets management, least-privilege IAM, and keeping vulnerabilities out of the pipeline You automate the second thing you'd otherwise do twice You can own on-call, run an incident calmly, and write the postmortem that prevents the repeat You work across infra without waiting on others You care about outcomes (uptime, deploy speed, systems that don't break) Strong Signals Built CI/CD pipelines from scratch (bonus if in GitHub Actions) Managed multi-service cloud infra entirely through code, modules and remote state included Ran containerized workloads across more than one deployment model (Cloud Run, GKE, VMs) Hardened a cloud environment: secrets management, workload identity, vulnerability scanning Stood up observability and tracing from zero Owned real incidents and wrote postmortems that actually stuck Auth0 or other identity-provider experience Startup, solo builder, or high-ownership environment Not a Fit If You can't commit to US Central Time business hours (9am to 5pm CST/CDT, weekdays) You need a runbook before you'll touch anything You want a narrow SRE-only or ops-only lane You optimize for perfect process over working systems You've mostly worked in large, slow-moving teams Success Looks Like Deploys are automated, frequent, and boring Platform uptime is rock solid Incidents get caught before members ever notice, and the ones that slip through never repeat Every infra change goes through Terraform, never a console click Release cycles get faster and safer over time Your First 30 Days By day 7 You have access to GCP, the repos, CI/CD, and on-call, and you've mapped how our services are deployed. You understand which services run where (Cloud Run, GKE, VMs) and why. You've shipped your first small change through the pipeline and watched it go out. By day 14 You've taken ownership of a piece of the infrastructure and made it more reliable or more automated. You're in the on-call rotation and have handled or shadowed a real alert. You've spotted a manual process or a fragile spot and have a plan to fix it. By day 30 You navigate the infrastructure independently, and deploys through you are routine. You've automated something that used to be manual, or hardened something that used to break. You own at least one part of the platform end-to-end and the team trusts you with it. You've named the biggest reliability and tooling risks and started knocking them down. Why Join High ownership, low bureaucracy You own the platform our products run on Build fast with modern tooling + AI Small team, real impact Screening Process Intro Call (20 min): Alignment, background, speed check Build / Architecture Exercise (2-4 hours max): Take a real infrastructure problem (e.g. design CI/CD, containerization, monitoring, security, and on-call for a new service) Outline how you'd build it Focus: automation, reliability, decisions Deep Dive (45 min): Walk through your thinking live Final rounds: A few more conversations with the team before a final decision We strongly prefer providing LinkedIn profiles on resumes so we can screen and validate.