About the role
Aplazo's mission is to empower financial access, opportunity, and freedom by connecting people and businesses in Latin America through fair, simple, and transparent financial solutions.

We are looking for a DevOps Tech Lead Manager to lead our DevOps squad - the team that keeps Aplazo's core infrastructure reliable, scalable, and secure. This is a first-line people management role: you will own the squad's delivery, quality, and on-call, while staying hands-on as an engineer 40-60% of your time. You are as comfortable running a 1:1 or writing a performance review as you are debugging a production incident or reviewing a Terraform change.

You are the person your squad trusts to remove blockers, tell them the truth (good or bad), and connect their day-to-day work to why it matters for Aplazo's business.

What you'll work on

Managing and growing a squad of 4-8 DevOps engineers (E1 through E3)

Owning your squad's delivery commitments, code/infra quality, and on-call rotation

Staying hands-on with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and observability work alongside your team

Running 1:1s, writing performance reviews, and coaching career growth for your reports

Hiring and onboarding new engineers into the squad

Owning squad-level incidents and post-mortems, escalating proactively when needed

Tying the squad's work to business OKRs/KPIs and representing the squad in planning and cross-team syncs

Key responsibilities
People & Team Development

Hire and onboard engineers through E3; run regular 1:1s and write performance reviews

Coach career growth for each report, with concrete development plans

Build psychological safety and ownership in the squad so problems surface early, not in production

Stay technically sharp enough to earn the squad's trust as an engineer, not just a manager

Act as a Culture & Values champion for the squad

Get Stuff Done

Ensure the squad delivers on its commitments at a predictable velocity and measurable quality

Own squad-level incidents and post-mortems; elevate proactively rather than let issues fester

Remove process, tooling, and tech-debt blockers instead of just escalating them

Stay hands-on (40-60%) with IaC, CI/CD pipelines, observability (Datadog), and cloud cost optimization

Business Impact





Keep the squad's work clearly tied to business OKRs and/or KPIs

Proactively propose business value (OKRs/KPIs) - be a protagonist, not just an executor

Give the squad a sense of purpose; explain why the work matters to the business

Identify trade-offs that balance delivery speed against regulatory constraints (CNBV, Condusef, etc.)

Communication & Leadership

Communicate clearly and kindly with reports, peers, and your own leader - including surfacing bad news early

Communicate risk and trade-offs clearly and as publicly as possible to all stakeholders

Represent the squad in planning, grooming, and cross-team syncs, recognizing individual contributions

Know when to ask for help and when to elevate

Give feedback that helps people improve, not feedback that just gets delivered

Translate external and business pressure into clear priorities the squad can act on

What we're looking for
Required experience

3+ years in DevOps, Platform, or Infrastructure Engineering with production ownership

Prior experience leading a team formally (as a manager) or informally (as a tech lead) - hiring, mentoring, or running incident response for others

Track record of owning delivery for a team, not just individual tickets

Comfort operating as a working manager: 40-60% hands-on IC work alongside people management

Technical skills

Strong expertise in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation)

Deep knowledge of CI/CD systems and modern delivery practices (trunk-based development, feature flags, incremental rollouts)

Hands-on experience with AWS (Fargate, ECS, EC2, RDS/Postgres, ElastiCache, Lambda, SQS, Kinesis)

Proficiency with observability tools - metrics, logs, traces, alerting (Datadog preferred)

Comfortable with scripting/automation in Python, Bash, or Node.js/TypeScript

Solid understanding of cloud security practices, secret management, and compliance requirements





People & management skills

Experience running 1:1s, giving structured feedback, and writing performance reviews

Ability to hire and onboard engineers, and to coach career growth across levels (E1-E3)

Builds psychological safety - team members raise problems early rather than hide them

Comfortable making people decisions (hiring, performance, growth plans) with fairness and empathy

Soft skills

Strong communicator: direct, clear, and comfortable surfacing bad news to reports, peers, and leadership - in Spanish, with working English for vendor/partner interactions

Manages ambiguity well: adjusts to changing priorities, makes conscious trade-offs, and proposes best practices from scratch when needed

Favors people over rigid process (Agile mindset) but takes workflow hygiene seriously (well-defined stories, estimation, clean PRs)

Growth mindset: seeks feedback, mentors others, and continuously improves own craft

Nice to have

Familiarity with GCP services (BigQuery, Pub/Sub)

Experience with MongoDB Atlas or other managed data stores

Exposure to fintech, payments, or regulated environments (CNBV, SOC 2, PCI)

Experience creating or improving on-call and incident response processes

Prior formal people-management experience (title of Manager, EM, or Team Lead)

Knowledge of DORA metrics and using them to drive team improvement

What success looks like

Your squad delivers on its commitments at a predictable, measurable velocity and quality

Incidents are owned end-to-end - proactive escalation, thorough post-mortems, and fewer repeat issues

Your reports grow faster because of your coaching, 1:1s, and honest feedback

The squad’s work is visibly tied to business OKRs/KPIs, and stakeholders trust your read on trade-offs

Problems surface early because your squad feels safe raising them

Why join us

Lead a squad building the infrastructure that powers financial inclusion across Latin America

Stay hands-on as an engineer while growing your people-leadership craft

Work in a high-growth fintech at the intersection of infrastructure, delivery, and real business impact

A team with deep roots in product, technology, and culture-focused companies.

#J-18808-Ljbffr

📌 DevOps Tech Lead Manager (Ciudad de México)
🏢 Aplazo
📍 Ciudad de México