DevOps Engineering Manager AWS, Kubernetes, Linux

Great to Meet You! We are Ascenda

Ascenda powers the growth of leading financial services brands worldwide with premium rewards programs that differentiate their products, drive profitable customer behaviors, and create sustained engagement.

We are behind the world-class rewards propositions of major banks and fintechs around the globe, including brands like American Express, Capital One, Brex, Revolut, Ramp, HSBC, Bank of New Zealand, Virgin Money (Australia), Bradesco (Brazil), ANZ (Australia), HDFC (India) and many others.

We are a thriving global Loyalty-as-a-Service company and are experiencing rapid expansion. Join our dynamic team contributing to the execution of our business strategies as we strive for hypergrowth. Our team spans 20 cities worldwide, with dual headquarters in Singapore and New York, totalling 270 team members.

Join us as a DevOps Engineering Manager in Singapore/Vietnam!

What we do

We're a small team of nice, experienced and (we think) fun folks. We treat our infrastructure as a product built for the engineers who use it every day. Our job is to make it smooth for them to ship, run and observe their services: good paved roads, sensible defaults, and self-service tooling so teams can move without waiting on us. It's all managed as code with Terraform, running on Kubernetes across multiple AWS accounts and regions, built and deployed through automated CI/CD pipelines and Helm charts. Grafana watches most of it. We're currently moving our CI/CD off Jenkins onto GitHub Actions.

Our engineers, DevOps and security teams work closely together to deliver for our clients. We believe in "you build it, you own it"; the cloud platform is there to make that ownership manageable by giving engineering teams the guardrails and guidelines to own what they ship. We care about automation and quality, and we've hit the tougher security standards (PCI-DSS, SOC2, ISO27001). Our clients are financial institutions and airlines, so they expect high availability, reliability and security.

On a typical day we reach for Terraform, Istio, ArgoCD, Kubectl, Helm, GitHub Actions, Grafana, Cloudflare... to name a few.

The Role

We are looking for someone to help our growing DevOps team (6+ engineers today) evolve into a Cloud Platform team. Our team genuinely cares about cloud, automation, reliability and security, and has several years of hands-on experience with our cloud-native stack. You'll lead and grow this team, but we also expect you to acquire deep knowledge of our stack and actively contribute to its continuous improvement.

Your Impact

• Set and continuously refine the cloud platform roadmap, prioritising based on stakeholders' input and your leader's vision for the technical organisation. .
• Lead, mentor and grow the team, drawing on your own hands-on skills and experience.
• Help design and evolve the cloud platform powering our current and future services, with a strong bias toward self-service and paved roads.
• Champion the "you build it, you own it" culture, giving teams the tooling, observability and guardrails to own their services with confidence.
• Ensure our platforms run smoothly, reliably and securely to serve our customers, and that quality standards for infrastructure, code and documentation are met and delivered on reasonable timelines.
• Propose and drive improvements in scalability, automation, performance, CI/CD and self-service; we encourage new ideas and strive for continuous improvement.

• Several years of hands-on experience and battle-scars with AWS, Linux, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD and observability, plus experience managing complex architectures at scale.
• Experience managing a team of engineers and fostering cross-team collaboration.
• Solid systems and cloud fundamentals, with strong troubleshooting, problem-solving and analytical skills.
• A developer-experience mindset: you think about internal tooling and infrastructure as products with real users, not just systems to keep running.
• You have experience with networking, databases (we use Postgres and Redshift) and are comfortable with building scripted automation and other internal tooling and interfaces. .
• You take a pragmatic view on cloud costs and FinOps. You are comfortable driving cost optimisations whilst balancing against reliability, velocity and performance.
• You have a security-and-compliance-first mindset. You've worked in regulated or audited environments (e.g. PCI-DSS, SOC2, ISO27001) and treat security and compliance as built into the platform, not bolted on.

Ascenda offers the unique opportunity to lead in LaaS, shaping the future of rewards programs. You'll be part of an environment that prizes groundbreaking ideas and their execution. We provide unparalleled career growth opportunities in a supportive and dynamic environment, complemented by a competitive compensation package that recognizes your impact.

Ascenda is dedicated to diversity and inclusion, welcoming candidates from all backgrounds. Join us on our mission to power the growth of the financial services industry by making loyalty simple and rewarding for everyone, everywhere.