Senior Engineer - DevOps & Support

Senior Engineer – DevOps & Support

Zia & Rabia Bhatti Foundation (ZRBF) — Islamabad, Pakistan

Full-Time | On-Site

About ZRBF

The Zia & Rabia Bhatti Foundation is a non-profit public limited company established under the Companies Act 2017. ZRBF is establishing Barkat International College (BIC) in Islamabad, and building Maktab: one unified platform for a college’s student records, ERP, classroom and AI tutor. BIC is our first customer. Our ambition is a platform serving 100,000 students across Pakistan and beyond. Our mission is to transform higher education through evidence-based, experiential learning, moving institutions beyond lecture-based models into immersive, technology-enhanced environments.

The Opportunity

We are seeking a hands-on Senior Engineer – DevOps & Support to deploy, run and safeguard Maktab, the platform we are building for BIC and the colleges after it: student records, ERP and the classroom, with an AI tutor, in a single system of record. Reporting to the Tech Lead, you will own Maktab’s production deployment on AWS, keep it healthy, secure and cost-efficient, and be the first point of contact for the students, teachers and staff who depend on it every day.

Maktab is at the beginning. The AWS architecture for its first launch is designed and moving from MVP towards production; you will turn that design into a running, monitored, recoverable system, and shape how the institution supports its users, from the first help-desk ticket to a mature support function. A system for 100,000 students will ask far more of its operations than the first launch, and you will build the practice that meets it.

We use AI coding agents across our work, for infrastructure as code and runbooks as well as application code. Experience working this way is a strong plus.

We are building a high-calibre team of exceptional engineers. You are the person the best engineers you have worked with would trust with their production systems at two in the morning.

Why this role

• Run a platform from its first college towards 100,000 students, and build the operations practice that scale needs.
• Lead engineering where AI is the method. We build with frontier AI models, and students will learn with them.
• See a whole college from the inside. Admissions, records, timetables, marks, classrooms and tutoring, in one system, for a college that is opening now.
• Work directly with ZRBF’s leadership. Decisions are made in the room you are in, and the reasons are written down.

The work is demanding, the standard is high, and we hold to it. If that is what you have been looking for, we would like to hear from you.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Deployment & Operations

• Lead the build-out and go-live of Maktab on AWS, following the agreed architecture across a primary region and a standby region
• Provision and operate the runtime: containerised application services, load balancing and the public front door, the relational database and its replication, file storage, the search index, and the network (VPCs, subnets, security groups, private access)
• Own backup, failover and disaster recovery: implement and regularly test the agreed RPO/RTO targets, including standby-region failover drills
• Manage identity and access: sign-in for students and staff through Keycloak, administrative access to the environments, secrets management, and signing-key rotation
• Establish observability: monitoring, logging, alerting and dashboards with defined SLOs, on-call practices, and incident response runbooks
• Build and maintain environments and CI/CD pipelines (development, staging, production) with infrastructure as code, so every change is reproducible and auditable
• Operate the platform’s integrations with third-party services, including the LLM API that powers the AI tutor: availability, quotas, latency and cost
• Track and manage AWS cost as enrolment grows from the first cohort towards 100,000 students; support scaling and A/B testing
• Keep the platform patched and secure, with appropriate protection for student and financial data

User Support & Enablement

• Serve as the first point of contact for students, teachers and administrative staff: triage issues, resolve them, and escalate defects to the engineering team with clear reproduction steps
• Build the support function from the ground up: ticketing workflow, knowledge base and how-to guides, service levels, and user onboarding and training sessions
• Gather recurring user pain points and feed them back into the product and infrastructure roadmap
• Grow and eventually lead a support team as the college scales

Team & Collaboration

• Work closely with the Tech Lead and developers on release readiness, environment management, and operational requirements for new features
• Contribute to engineering standards, architecture and code reviews, and documentation
• Work with academic and operational colleagues to turn day-to-day needs into reliable, wellsupported systems

Required Qualifications

• 7–10 years of professional experience in software engineering, DevOps or infrastructure roles, with significant time operating production systems
• Deep hands-on AWS experience: compute (EC2, with ECS/EKS as scale demands), RDS/PostgreSQL, S3, IAM, VPC, Route 53, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager or KMS; AWS certification a plus
• Production experience with Docker and Docker Compose, and with container orchestration
• Experience designing or running multi-region deployments with backup, replication and failover
• Linux administration and scripting in Python and Bash; Go a plus. Be prepared to walk us through code and infrastructure you have written, in depth.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform or CloudFormation) and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or similar)
• Solid understanding of relational databases, networking fundamentals, identity/SSO and security best practice
• Demonstrated experience supporting non-technical users: strong written and spoken English and Urdu, patience, and a service mindset
• Works independently, prioritises under pressure, and documents clearly

Preferred Qualifications

• ERPNext/Frappe, Moodle or Keycloak, or the EdTech and higher education sector more broadly
• Operating applications that integrate LLM APIs (e.g. Anthropic Claude, OpenAI) in production
• Search engines (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch) and observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry)
• Help-desk/ITSM tooling (Jira Service Management, Zendesk, Freshdesk or similar) and ITIL-style practice
• DevSecOps and GitOps workflows
• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field

What We Offer

• Compensation at the top of the market for an exceptional candidate, and we will not lose the right person over salary
• Performance bonus tied to platform uptime, go-live milestones and user satisfaction
• Top-of-the-line equipment and AI development tools
• The chance to build the operations and support practice of a new institution from day one
• Professional development support: AWS certifications, conferences and learning resources

Location

Islamabad, Pakistan (On-site)

How to Apply

Send your CV with a short note on a production system you have deployed and operated end to end: what it was, the decision that mattered most, and what you would do differently. Links to public work (GitHub, portfolio, etc.) are welcome. We read every application closely, interview few, and take our time with each. Send it to [email protected]

ZRBF is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.

Work Location: In person