DevOps Engineer — AWS, Terraform, CI/CD & WebSocket Scaling for Real-Time Chat Platform

We are building TeamChat, a workspace-based real-time team collaboration platform (similar to Slack). This role owns all infrastructure: AWS environments, CI/CD, observability, and scaling a stateful WebSocket workload. Architecture documents available for shortlisted candidates. One of 5 parallel roles; ongoing engagement as the product grows. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES & SCOPE OF WORK 1. Environments: Dev / Staging / Prod on AWS via Terraform (IaC from day one). ECS Fargate (or EKS — propose with reasoning), RDS PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis, S3 + CloudFront, Route53, ACM. 2. WebSocket Scaling: ALB configuration for long-lived connections, graceful deploys without dropping connections (connection draining), horizontal scaling of gateway nodes with Redis pub/sub, load testing to 10,000+ concurrent connections. 3. CI/CD: GitHub Actions pipelines (lint, test, build, deploy) with preview environments per PR for backend + frontend, automated DB migrations with rollback strategy. 4. Observability: Centralized logs, metrics, traces (CloudWatch + Grafana/Prometheus or equivalent), alerting, uptime SLO dashboards, API cost monitoring for the AI services. 5. Security & Cost: IAM least-privilege, secrets management (SSM/Secrets Manager), VPC design, automated backups + tested restore runbook, monthly cost reporting and optimization. We expect you to keep infrastructure lean. REQUIRED TECH STACK - AWS (ECS/EKS, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, ALB) - Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions - Monitoring: Prometheus/Grafana or CloudWatch - Linux, bash PROJECT DETAILS - Engagement: Hourly, $13–$30/hr depending on experience. 30+ hrs/week initially; may taper to part-time maintenance after launch (ongoing). - Process: Daily async standup (English, text), code review via GitHub PRs. At least 3–4 hours of overlap with JST (UTC+9). - IP & Code: All infrastructure code in our GitHub org from day one; full ownership by us. - Language: English required. Urdu-speaking developers welcome. QUESTIONS TO ANSWER IN YOUR PROPOSAL 1. Describe an infrastructure you built and ran in production: traffic scale, monthly AWS cost, and one incident you handled end-to-end. 2. ECS Fargate vs EKS for our scale (early-stage, target 10k concurrent WebSocket connections) — which would you pick and why? 3. How do you deploy a new version of a WebSocket gateway without dropping live connections? 4. Timezone, weekly availability, proposed rate. 5. Start your proposal with the word TEAMCHAT.