Senior DevOps & SRE Engineer (SDE 3)
Platform & Reliability Engineering
Location: Dubai, UAE |Function: Engineering| Type: Full-Time| Experience: 7–10 years
ABOUT THE ROLE
We are building one of the region's most ambitious e-commerce platforms: high-traffic, multi-region, and engineered for scale. Our platform — around fifteen backend services, a web storefront and native mobile apps — handles thousands of orders every day, and every one of them depends on infrastructure that is fast, observable, and always on.
This is a founding role for our DevOps & SRE function. You will move our platform off a managed commerce PaaS onto infrastructure we own, set the reliability bar for every engineering squad, and build the team that keeps it there.
ABOUT THE FUNCTION
DevOps & SRE sits at the centre of Lulu's e-commerce engineering. We own the platform every squad ships on: cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, CI/CD, data stores, networking, security and observability. We run on-call and incident response, define SLOs with product squads, and make sure peak sales events are boring. Over the next 12–18 months our biggest goal is migrating our workloads from a vendor-managed platform onto our own cloud footprint. We are deliberately keeping the team lean and AI-first: we expect AI agents and assistants to take on a large share of the toil — writing infrastructure-as-code and pipelines, triaging alerts, drafting runbooks and postmortems — so a small team can run a large platform.
Core ownership: Cloud infrastructure & Kubernetes, CI/CD & release engineering, observability stack, data-store operations, on-call & incident management, platform migration
WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON
- Lead the migration of our e-commerce platform from a vendor-managed PaaS onto our own cloud infrastructure: discovery, target architecture, migration waves, cutover and decommissioning
- Design and run production Kubernetes for ~15 Python/Django services (DRF, Celery workers and beat), a Next.js storefront and supporting APIs, with Helm and GitOps-based delivery
- Operate and scale the stateful core of the platform: PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka and Elasticsearch — HA, backups, point-in-time recovery, upgrades and capacity planning
- Build an open-source observability stack across metrics, logs, traces and profiles (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry) that every squad uses day to day
- Define SLIs, SLOs and error budgets with product squads for checkout, order management, delivery promise and storefront APIs, and alert on what customers actually feel
- Modernise CI/CD on Bitbucket Pipelines: build and release standards, progressive delivery (canary, blue-green), automated rollbacks and idempotent release scripts
- Codify everything as infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/OpenTofu), including networking, IAM, secrets management and environment provisioning
- Prepare the platform for peak events — load testing, autoscaling, capacity reviews and game days — so sale days run without incident
- Run incident response and blameless postmortems, and drive the reliability fixes that come out of them
- Own cloud cost visibility and optimisation (FinOps), making sure we spend where it buys reliability or speed
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Scope & Impact
- Own multi-quarter, multi-team infrastructure and reliability goals, with the migration programme as the headline deliverable
- Make independent technical decisions on open-ended problems — build vs buy, managed vs self-hosted, which tool and when — grounded in business context and cost
- Drive cross-team initiatives across backend, frontend, mobile and data squads, optimising for the platform as a whole rather than any one team
Technical Craft
- Design infrastructure that meets its reliability, security and cost objectives and stays simple enough for a small team to run
- Debug non-deterministic production issues across the stack — kernel, network, container runtime, database, application — that escape less experienced engineers
- Automate toil relentlessly; treat runbooks, dashboards and alerts as code that is reviewed, versioned and tested
- Identify and retire technical risk early: single points of failure, untested backups, unpatched dependencies, end-of-life runtimes
- Champion an AI-first engineering culture — use AI tools and assistants to speed up infrastructure work, incident analysis and documentation
Leadership & Strategy
- Build the DevOps & SRE function: define its charter, roadmap and operating model, and how it works with product squads (platform-as-a-product, paved roads, self-service)
- Hire, coach and grow DevOps and SRE engineers; set the hiring bar and run interview loops for the function
- Keep the team lean by design — build automation and AI-assisted workflows that let a small team operate the whole platform, and measure the efficiency gains they deliver
- Design a sustainable on-call rotation with clear escalation paths, severity levels, incident command roles and stakeholder communication
- Establish reliability practices across engineering: SLO reviews, production-readiness reviews, postmortem culture, change management and DR drills
- Measure and report engineering health with DORA metrics, SLO attainment and cost dashboards; present them to engineering and business leadership
- Manage vendor relationships and infrastructure budget, and make the case for investment with data
- Act as a Culture Leader — partner with engineering leadership to set the tone, foster psychological safety and champion inclusive practices
MUST-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS
These are non-negotiable. We need engineers who can hit the ground running with our stack and ways of working.
- 7+ years in DevOps, SRE or platform engineering, including 2+ years leading or acting as technical lead for an infrastructure or reliability team
- Expert-level Kubernetes in production — cluster design, networking, ingress, autoscaling (HPA, KEDA, cluster autoscaler), upgrades and troubleshooting
- Deep experience with at least one major cloud (GCP preferred; AWS or Azure acceptable): VPC design, IAM, load balancing, managed databases and cost optimisation
- Strong infrastructure-as-code with Terraform or OpenTofu, plus Helm and a GitOps tool (Argo CD or Flux)
- Set up end-to-end observability and monitoring from scratch using open-source tools — metrics (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager), logs (Loki or ELK/OpenSearch), distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry with Tempo or Jaeger) and error tracking (self-hosted Sentry) — covering infrastructure, Kubernetes, databases, queues and application code, with dashboards, alert routing and on-call integration that teams rely on
- Practical SRE experience: defining SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, symptom-based alerting, incident command and blameless postmortems
- CI/CD expertise (Bitbucket Pipelines, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Jenkins) with deployment strategies such as canary and blue-green
- Strong Linux, networking (DNS, TLS, CDN, load balancers) and scripting skills in Python, Go or Bash — able to read and debug Python/Django application code
- Experience running Python web services and async workers (Celery or similar) in production, ideally in e-commerce, retail or other high-traffic consumer platforms
NICE-TO-HAVE QUALIFICATIONS
These will set you apart and accelerate your impact, but aren't required on day one.
- Hands-on leadership of at least one production migration between cloud providers (e.g. AWS to GCP, Azure to AWS) or from a managed PaaS to self-managed infrastructure — planning, data migration, cutover and rollback
- Proven experience migrating stateful systems with minimal downtime: PostgreSQL (logical replication, CDC), Kafka (MirrorMaker 2), Elasticsearch (snapshot/restore, reindexing) and Redis
- Experience operating Kafka on Kubernetes (Strimzi), PostgreSQL operators (CloudNativePG, Zalando, Patroni) and the Elastic operator (ECK)
- Long-term metrics storage and scale-out observability: Thanos, Mimir or VictoriaMetrics; continuous profiling with Pyroscope; self-hosted Sentry
- Platform security and supply chain: HashiCorp Vault or External Secrets, Trivy, Kyverno or OPA Gatekeeper, Falco, image signing and SBOMs
- Chaos engineering and load testing with LitmusChaos or Chaos Mesh, and k6 or Locust
- Cost tooling and FinOps practice: OpenCost or Kubecost, rightsizing, committed-use and spot strategies
- Building an internal developer platform or portal (e.g. Backstage) for service templates and self-service environments
- Familiarity with GCP data services (BigQuery, Pub/Sub) and supporting data-platform workloads
- Certifications such as CKA/CKS, Google Professional Cloud Architect or DevOps Engineer, or AWS DevOps Professional
- Public contributions: conference talks, technical blog posts or open-source maintainership
TECH STACK
Application stack
Python 3.9–3.12 (Django, DRF), Celery, Next.js / React, React Native
Data stores
PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch
Messaging
Kafka
Cloud
GCP (GKE, BigQuery, Pub/Sub) — target for platform migration; AWS / Azure exposure valued
Containers
Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CD
IaC
Terraform / OpenTofu, Ansible
CI/CD
Bitbucket Pipelines
Observability
Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana, Loki, Tempo, OpenTelemetry, Sentry
Security
Vault / External Secrets, Trivy, Kyverno, WAF
Reliability
SLOs & error budgets, k6, Chaos Mesh, OpenCost
OUR VALUES
At Lulu, our values aren't wall decorations — they guide how we work, hire, and grow.
Be Customer Obsessed — Every decision in service of the customer's success.
Speak & Act Courageously — Challenge the status quo, take calculated risks, and advocate for new ideas.
Take Extreme Ownership — Nothing is someone else's problem. Uphold excellence and accountability.
Learn Voraciously — Growth mindset, curiosity, and continuous improvement.
Move with Focus & Urgency — Identify the highest-impact work and move fast.
Win as One Team — Celebrate wins, lend a hand, and invest in each other's growth.
We believe great engineering is about judgment, ownership, and craft — not just code.
If that resonates, we would love to hear from you.
