Senior DevOps Engineer | GCP & Django Expert | Terraform & GKE/Cloud Run

Job Title (we need PDF resume - no resume no response) - pay is part-time for $750 per month (20h/week) and then transitions to full time after funding. Senior DevOps Engineer | GCP & Django Expert | Terraform & GKE/Cloud Run Job Description We are mid-way through a significant architecture refactor. The codebase is Django/Python on GCP (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Secret Manager). We need a senior Release Engineer who can own the final gate to production: code review, PR approval, migration safety, deployment execution, and post-deploy verification. This role sits between development and live users. You are the person who stops bad code reaching children's financial accounts. That is the job. At a glance Seniority Mid–Senior (6–8 yrs) Stack Django · Python · GCP Context Active arch refactor Reporting to Chief AI & Ethics Officer Sector EdTech / FinTech Users Ages 6–24, real money Responsibilities Release gate ownership Final technical review and approval of all PRs targeting main/production. Act as Code Owner for protected branches. Block or approve with a clear, documented reason every time. Migration management Review every Django migration before merge. Run migrations in staging first. Check for breaking schema changes, data migrations, backwards compatibility, and rollback paths. Own the zero-downtime migration playbook. Deployment execution Own the deploy process end-to-end. Run the pipeline, monitor rollout health, manage canary or blue-green cutover. Execute or coordinate hotfix deploys. Architecture refactor support We are actively refactoring a multi-tenant Django monolith. You will review and validate refactor PRs, coordinate staged rollouts of breaking changes, and maintain release stability throughout. Pre-deploy verification Staging smoke tests, environment parity checks, secrets and config validation, dependency and vulnerability audit before every release. Post-deploy verification Health check monitoring, error rate review, connection pool and Cloud SQL validation, rollback decisions, stakeholder comms. CI/CD pipeline ownership Maintain and improve GitHub Actions workflows. Enforce required checks and branch protection. Keep build times reasonable and test coverage gates meaningful. Runbooks and documentation Document every deploy procedure. Keep the rollback playbook current and actually usable. No tribal knowledge. ________________________________________ Required technical skills Django and Python Senior-level Django. Reads migrations fluently. Understands ORM behaviour, signals, middleware ordering, and connection pooling edge cases. Experience reviewing Django RBAC implementations. Knows what a bad migration looks like at a glance. GCP Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, Secret Manager. IAM, service accounts, VPC connectors, Cloud SQL proxy. Connection pool management and CONN_MAX_AGE behaviour in Cloud Run. Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring for post-deploy triage. PostgreSQL operations Migration safety: index creation without locking, transaction boundaries. Connection pool debugging under load. Data migration patterns without downtime. CI/CD and Git GitHub Actions pipeline authoring and debugging. Branch protection rules, required checks, environment gates. Advanced Git: rebase hygiene, reverting safely, code ownership. Signed commits, commit attribution, audit trail discipline. Security and secrets Secrets rotation policy and Secret Manager integration. No credentials in repos — ever. IAM-first mindset. SAST, dependency scanning, Dependabot or Renovate management. Service account key hygiene and audit log review. Infrastructure Docker and container image scanning. Terraform or Pulumi preferred. IaC-first, no console-clicking. Observability tooling: Sentry or equivalent for error tracking. Non-technical requirements Discipline to reject a PR under delivery pressure, including from senior stakeholders. Clear, concise written communication for release notes and post-mortems. Calm and methodical during production incidents. Documentation instinct — runbooks anyone can follow, not just you. Comfortable working asynchronously across time zones. Accountability without blame: owns failures, learns, documents. Nice to have Experience in regulated environments: SOC 2, PCI, COPPA/FERPA, or similar. We handle real money for minors and the bar is high. Prior experience inheriting and stabilising a codebase post-vendor handover. Familiarity with multi-tenant Django architectures. Experience with blue-green or canary deployment patterns in Cloud Run. ________________________________________