Staff DevOps

Who We Are 

KEV builds mission-critical financial software for K12 schools across North America. Our platform provides real-time visibility and control over how funds are collected and managed, replacing fragmented workflows with secure, modern systems that schools rely on every day. 

Trusted by more than 27,000 K12 schools managing over $8B annually, KEV delivers mission-critical software for payments, accounting, and reporting, where reliability and security matter.  Headquartered in Toronto with teams across North America, we are scaling quickly and investing deeply in cloud-native, data-driven technology. 

KEV is a place for people who care about building durable software at scale and doing work that has real impact in public education. We focus on solving hard problems, raising the bar on engineering craft, and building products that earn long-term trust from the communities we serve. 

This role is for an active vacancy.

About the Role 

We are hiring a DevOps to help design, evolve, and scale the core systems that power KEV’s financial platform. In this role, you will work across frontend and backend services to deliver secure, high-performance software that supports complex financial workflows. You will contribute to architectural decisions, system design, and platform evolution as KEV continues to grow.

This role requires deep experience building and operating SaaS software at scale. You will design systems that remain reliable under real-world load, handle sensitive financial data with care, and support distributed architectures as usage grows. You will collaborate closely with Product, Design, and Engineering peers to translate real school needs into scalable, durable solutions that earn long-term trust.

How You Will Contribute

Infrastructure as Code
Own KEV's IaC strategy across Azure - expanding Terraform/Bicep coverage, retiring manually configured resources, and setting the standard for how infrastructure changes get proposed, reviewed, and deployed.

Containerization & Platform Modernization
Lead the move from traditional VM/IIS-based deployments toward PaaS and containerized workloads. Evaluate and stand-up container orchestration, establish image and registry standards, and build the CI/CD patterns that support them.

CI/CD Pipeline Engineering
Design and maintain build and release pipelines with GitHub Enterprise that are fast, reliable, and secure by default covering how builds are triggered and tested, how releases are approved, and how rollbacks happen when something goes wrong. Establish the pipeline patterns and standards other teams build against.

Automation & Toil Reduction
Find the manual, repetitive operational work - provisioning, patching, certificate rotation, deployment steps - and automate it out using PowerShell, Azure Functions, and IaC tooling.

Security & Compliance by Design
Build infrastructure and pipelines that meet KEV's PCI DSS and SOC 2 obligations by default: hardened configurations, least-privilege access, and auditable change history built in, not bolted on after.

Production Reliability & Incident Response
Act as a senior escalation point for complex production issues. Participate in on-call, lead post-incident reviews, and turn recurring failure patterns into permanent fixes instead of one-off workarounds.

Mentorship & Technical Leadership
Raise the bar across the DevOps team. Review work, set direction, and help junior and intermediate engineers grow into the practices this role is putting in place.

Cross-Functional Collaboration
Partner with Engineering, Security, and Database teams so infrastructure and deployment decisions stay grounded in how KEV's products actually get built and run.

Who You Are

• 6-7+ years in DevOps/SRE roles, with a track record of leading infrastructure and platform modernization, not just executing someone else's plan.
• Deep, hands-on IaC experience (Terraform and/or Bicep). You've owned IaC standards for an org, not just scripted the occasional resource.
• Direct production experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, K8s/AKS), ideally including migrating legacy VM-based workloads onto a container platform.
• Solid grounding in SRE principles with SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, observability, and reducing toil through automation.
• Strong command of the Microsoft Azure ecosystem and GitHub Actions CI/CD.
• Comfortable supporting .NET Framework/.NET Core applications with React front ends running as SaaS in Azure.
• Experience automating operational work with PowerShell, Azure Functions, or similar.
• Working knowledge of security hardening and compliance frameworks (PCI DSS, SOC 2, NIST, CIS Benchmarks) in regulated environments.
• Experience mentoring or informally leading engineers, with the communication skills to translate technical trade-offs for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Pragmatic and ownership-driven. Finding the right long-term fix, not just the fastest patch.

What We Offer 

• Competitive compensation – We believe in rewarding great work with fair, competitive pay. 

• Meaningful benefits– Because your well-being matters; both at work and at home. 

• Retirement Savings Support – We help you plan for your future with company-matched programs, including RRSP matching in Canada and 401(k) contributions in the U.S. 

• Professional development – We invest in your growth with ongoing learning, stretch opportunities, and continuing education, including KEV Academy for onboarding and skill-building, plus KEV University, our online platform offering a wide range of courses. 

• Hybrid model – 3 days in the office to collaborate and connect, with flexibility the rest of the week. 

• Flexible PTO – Take the time you need to recharge with close to 4 weeks of vacation and a company-wide holiday closure 

•  Office perks – Enjoy a fully stocked snack bar and occasional catered lunches—because we know that great conversations (and ideas) often start around good food. 

Salary Range - $150,000-180,000 

Note: We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed above.