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Pelico is a manufacturing orchestration platform that uses AI to connect fragmented supply chain, production, and quality data for industrial operations. The company serves aerospace and defense customers (Airbus, Boeing, Safran, Eaton, Cartier) and is backed by General Catalyst, 83North, and Serena with $72M raised. Headquartered in Paris with US offices in Miami, London, and Amsterdam, Pelico is growing 300% YoY.
In this role, you will lead a small DevOps team (3–5 engineers) and own how Pelico is packaged, deployed, and operated in air-gapped, on-premise environments where customers' IT teams operate the product independently without Pelico's direct access to clusters, logs, or data. This is a player-coach role requiring hands-on infrastructure work alongside team leadership and direct customer engagement.
Over 12–18 months, you will drive two co-primary initiatives: (1) on-premise deployment tooling and packaging to make Pelico self-operable and repeatable for enterprise customers, and (2) federal posture work—standing up GovCloud/FedRAMP compliance (controls as code) to serve federal and defense customers on certified infrastructure. The federal track is the most probable near-term direction.
Key responsibilities include: designing observability and self-remediation for air-gapped environments (shipped diagnostics, remediation playbooks, health checks, auto-classification); building Helm charts, Docker Compose stacks, and Terraform/IaC for on-prem single-VM, air-gapped Kubernetes, and private-cloud variants (GKE/GKS, EKS, AKS); converting bespoke deployments into repeatable tooling with clear runbooks; establishing RACI and SLAs with customer IT teams; and leading by example while growing your engineers. You will remain hands-on, allocating 20–50% of your time to infrastructure work.
Requirements:
- Track record operating enterprise software in customer-owned, on-premise, or air-gapped environments; OR equivalent depth standing up regulated/government-cloud (GovCloud/FedRAMP) environments.
- Deep, current hands-on expertise: Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform/IaC, Docker/Compose; managed Kubernetes (GKE/EKS/AKS) and on-prem/bare-metal.
- Observability expertise for customer self-operation: Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Splunk; ability to design diagnostics and remediation for disconnected environments.
- Proven track record owning committed enterprise deliverables end-to-end with customer IT (RACI, SLAs, checkpoints, scope) and hitting dates.
- Leadership experience: managed ~3+ engineers or exceptional hands-on tech lead ready to build and run a small team.
- Comfort treating security and operability as infrastructure; experience in regulated, customer-owned, or on-prem environments with focus on auditability and self-service.
Nice to have:
- GovCloud and/or FedRAMP experience (strongly preferred/expected): AWS GovCloud, Azure Government, GCP Assured Workloads, or prior FedRAMP authorization (Moderate/High, IL, CMMC).
- Aerospace, defense, government, or regulated on-prem experience; air-gap or ITAR/EAR exposure.
- Self-service/platform-engineering philosophy (golden paths, self-remediation).
- AI-native ways of working (scoped tasks, heavy context, retained ownership).
- Secrets management, backup/DR, upgrade/migration tooling for disconnected sites; Fargate/ECS.
