Principal DevOps Engineer

Location Remote (Europe) / Relocation to Barcelona (Hybrid) Project FinTech Holding (Payment Processing) Salary From €8,000 SmartCore is a fintech holding building infrastructure for the next generation of payments. Our solutions cover the entire financial operations cycle — from core banking and processing to cards, wallets, and anti-fraud systems. Our core area is card acquiring , ensuring high-speed and secure payment processing. Over the past five years, we have built a reliable infrastructure across the EU and CIS , launched our own payment solutions , and continue to grow actively. Principal DevOps Engineer to lead the infrastructure direction in our payment processing holding. This is a role for an expert who wants to combine architectural design, leadership of a small team (1-2 engineers), and hands-on engineering ("playing coach"). You will develop infrastructure where downtime is costly and data security is priority 1. We maintain a high engineering culture and need a leader to guarantee its stability, security compliance and evolution. Technical Landscape Cloud: AWS (Deep dive : Multi-account environment, AWS Organizations, VPC, TGW, Security Groups, IAM Roles). Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS) & Amazon ECS. IaC: Terraform (strict State management, modularity, Terragrunt). CI / CD: GitOps (ArgoCD), GitHub Actions. Observability: CloudWatch, Prometheus Agent, Grafana, ELK / Loki. Scaling: Karpenter, HPA (Horizontal Pod Autoscaler). Security: AWS WAF, Secrets Manager, External Secrets. Your Responsibilities Strategy & Architecture: Design fault-tolerant (Multi-AZ) architecture for payment processing. Centralized management of the multi-account AWS landscape (Governance, Control Tower). Technical leadership of the DevOps team (1-2 people): mentorship, code review, process building. Interaction with CTO and development: implementing SRE practices, defining SLI / SLO. Engineering & Automation (Hands-on): Writing and maintaining Terraform code ("Infra as Code" is our standard). Fine-tuning autoscaling for EKS and ECS (Karpenter Spot Instances where applicable) to balance cost and reliability. Managing pipelines via GitHub Actions and releases via ArgoCD. Security & Reliability (SecOps): PCI DSS Compliance: ensuring the infrastructure meets strict security standards and passing audits. Ensuring network isolation and security governance across all accounts. Building high-quality monitoring and alerting for the entire infrastructure stack (VictoriaMetrics) to ensure complete observability and rapid incident response. Organizing and testing Disaster Recovery (RPO / RTO). Expectations Experience: 8 years in DevOps / SRE, with proven experience in leadership or mentorship roles. PCI DSS: Mandatory deep knowledge of PCI DSS requirements and experience building compliant infrastructures. AWS: Solution Architect level. Experience managing multi-account environments and landing zones. Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS) & ECS. Terraform: Writing maintainable code, experience with complex modules. English: B2 (confident communication with international partners). Mindset: You understand that in FinTech, there are no minor details. You consider Cost (FinOps) and Security (SecOps) at the design stage. We Offer Compensation: From €8,000 (negotiable based on level). Location: Comfortable remote work in a European time zone or relocation assistance to Barcelona. Impact: Direct access to technical decision-making, no bureaucracy, adequate management. Culture: We invest in engineering quality (modern tools, documentation, clear processes). If you are ready to build a reliable foundation for a financial product and lead a team — feel free to apply directly via LinkedIn or by sending your CV to ****** J-*****-Ljbffr