DevOps Engineer (CI/CD) Intern

About the Role

This is a high-ownership DevOps role inside a fast-moving startup where infrastructure, pipelines, and workflows are evolving weekly and ambiguity is normal. You will work closely with the founding team to build CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, release automation, environments, and developer productivity tooling. You will be trusted with meaningful responsibility for how fast and safely we ship and expected to operate with maturity, initiative, and speed.

What This Role Is Really About

You are not here to “wait for tickets.”

You are here to:

Take ownership of real CI/CD and developer experience problems.

Move automation and infra projects forward without being micromanaged.

Identify bottlenecks in build, test, and deploy before they hurt velocity.

Ship improvements that measurably increase deployment reliability and speed.

Think beyond scripts and understand the impact on product and team workflow.

You should be comfortable where:

Requirements and environments evolve.

Documentation is incomplete or outdated.

Speed matters, but you can’t compromise safety.

Decisions must be made with imperfect information.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or GitLab CI).

Manage build, test, and release automation for multiple services.

Work with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform or Pulumi) to define environments.

Improve Docker-based build and deployment workflows.

Implement rollout strategies (canary, blue-green, feature flags) for safer releases.

Integrate quality gates, security checks, and observability hooks into pipelines.

Build internal tools and automations that improve developer productivity.

Document pipelines, environments, and operational runbooks.

What We Expect From You

Founding Mindset

You think in terms of outcomes (faster, safer shipping), not just YAML.

You ask “why does this pipeline matter?” before building.

You act like deployment reliability is your responsibility.

You balance quick fixes with long-term maintainability.

You don’t wait to be told which bottlenecks to remove.

Maturity

You communicate clearly and concisely about risk and impact.

You admit mistakes (like a bad rollout) quickly and lead mitigation.

You take feedback without ego from infra and product engineers.

You stay calm under pressure during incidents or failed deploys.

You finish what you start and clean up half-done migrations.

Initiative

You propose improvements to build, test, and release processes.

You investigate root causes behind flaky pipelines or slow builds.

You document your findings and keep runbooks up to date.

You improve infra and developer tooling without being asked.

You continuously optimise your own and the team’s workflow.

DevOps Competence

Familiarity with GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.

Basic Docker knowledge and container-based workflows.

Exposure to Kubernetes basics is a plus.

Understanding of Terraform or Pulumi and infrastructure-as-code concepts.

Comfort with Git, branching, and release engineering practices.

Bonus

Experience setting up CI/CD for microservices.

Exposure to security checks or compliance in pipelines.

Experience with feature flags and rollout strategies.

What Success Looks Like

You own CI/CD for a subset of services.

You reduce deployment friction and failures for engineers.

You anticipate and fix pipeline bottlenecks before they hurt teams.

You contribute meaningfully to developer velocity and confidence.

What You Gain

Real-world experience running CI/CD and infra for a production system.

Direct collaboration with founders and core engineers.

A portfolio of pipelines, automations, and infra changes you shipped.

A path to a DevOps, platform, or infrastructure engineering role.

Who Should Not Apply

If you only want to follow runbooks line-by-line.

If you avoid ambiguity or touching production-adjacent systems.

If you prefer rigid corporate infra environments.

If you are looking for a low-intensity internship.

Who Will Thrive Here

Builders who love making teams faster and safer.

Systems thinkers who see connections between code, infra, and process.

Calm debuggers of broken builds and flaky deploys.

High-agency individuals who care about shipping velocity and reliability.