SRE / DevOps Lead

About the role

As april's SRE / DevOps Lead, you'll own the reliability, scalability, and security of the infrastructure that powers our platform — a system trusted by leading wealth managers, banks, and consumer fintechs to handle some of the most sensitive financial data their users have. You'll work HO (80%) and lead a team of 1 SRE and 1 ITSecOps (20%) and partner closely with product engineering, security, and our compliance partners to make sure what we build runs the way our customers (and the IRS) expect.

This is a hands-on lead role. You'll set the technical direction for our cloud platform, deployment pipelines, observability, and on-call practices — and you'll write the code, configs, and runbooks that get us there. You'll also own april's IT function (identity, endpoints, SaaS) at a tighter scope, keeping the company secure and productive as we grow.

What you'll do

• Lead and grow a team of 1 SRE and 1 ITSecOps, setting direction across SRE, DevOps, and IT

• Own the architecture, performance, and reliability of april's GCP-based platform — Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD, networking, and scale

• Define and uphold our SLOs, infra budgets, on-call priorities, and incident response practice

• Build and operate our observability stack so engineers can find and fix problems before customers feel them

• Partner with engineering and security on the controls, evidence, and audits that keep us SOC 2, SOC1 and STIG compliant and IRS-authorized

• Plan and execute capacity, load testing, and game days for tax season — the highest-stakes window of our year

• Own corporate IT: identity (Okta), Google Workspace, endpoint management (Jamf / Kandji), and the SaaS stack used across the company

• Set the standard for how we ship: fast, safe, observable, and reversible

What you'll bring

• 6+ years of SRE / DevOps / Platform Engineering experience, including 1y+ leading or managing engineers

• Deep, hands-on experience running production workloads on GCP — Kubernetes (GKE) and Terraform at real scale, not just consumed off-the-shelf

• Strong programming or scripting fundamentals (Go, Python, or similar) and a track record of automating processes

• Experience operating in a SOC 2 environment and supporting external audits; comfort working alongside compliance and security partners

• Experience with regulated workloads (IRS, financial services, healthcare, or similar) — or a clear, demonstrated desire to go deep on what that means

• Strong observability instincts: you've built dashboards, alerts, and SLOs in Datadog (or equivalent) that engineers actually rely on

• Calm, clear leadership during incidents — and a coaching mindset for your team between them

• Clear written and spoken English; comfortable collaborating with our NYC team across time zones

Bonus points

• IRS e-file ecosystem, FTI handling, or fintech-grade data residency experience.

• Experience preparing infrastructure for a certification milestone (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI, SOC1, STIG).

• FinOps / cloud cost management experience.

• Database operations at scale (Postgres, Spanner, or similar).

• Experience standing up or scaling an IT function at a high-growth startup.

• 3+ years of experience as a software engineer - Advantage!

How we work

• Mission first. Every decision ties back to building a smarter, simpler tax experience.

• Team over ego. We value contribution over credit and bring others along.

• Win with determination. We pursue outcomes others assume are impossible — and we iterate until we get there.

About april

april is the only embedded, year-round tax platform built to power smarter financial decisions. From filing to planning to onboarding, april’s white-labeled tools bring real-time tax intelligence into the platforms people already use, helping users understand the impact of every paycheck, equity transaction, or income shift, and stay on top of tax payments throughout the year. Built to handle even the most complex tax situations, april’s AI-powered tax engine ingests data directly from partner apps to deliver accurate outcomes in record time—making tax planning and filing more connected, contextual, and accessible than ever. With API-first infrastructure and seamless data integrations, april helps partners deliver more value, deepen loyalty, and turn taxes into a strategic edge—for their clients and their business.