DevOps Engineer (AWS ECS + Hetzner)

MenuWise is a 20-year-old B2B SaaS platform trusted by professional kitchens, caterers, and food manufacturers across Australia, New Zealand.

We are rebuilding the platform for the next decade not chasing trends, but fixing real problems:
accurate costing, reliable nutrition data, real-time supplier ingestion, and software that works in high-pressure kitchen environments.

clarity beats cleverness, and reliability beats novelty

not

intentionally does not use Kubernetes

We run infrastructure that is:

• Easy to reason about
• Cost-conscious
• Operable by a small senior team
  

Our stack:

• AWS ECS / Fargate for production

• Hetzner Cloud (and some bare-metal) for dev, staging, model training, and administration

• Terraform for infrastructure as code

• CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI)

If you enjoy simplifying systems rather than adding layers, this role will resonate.

The Role

senior individual contributor role with real ownership

only DevOps / Infrastructure engineer

You will work directly with backend and ML engineers, and you will be trusted to:

• Make sound technical decisions
• Balance cost, reliability, and security
• Keep production calm and predictable
  

responsibility over hierarchy

What Youll Do

Own the Infrastructure

• Run AWS production systems end-to-end (ECS/Fargate, EC2, RDS PostgreSQL, S3, IAM, VPC, ALB/NLB, WAF)
• Operate Hetzner dev/staging infrastructure, including recovery and failure handling
• Design clear boundaries between dev, staging, and production
• Keep the system understandable for the entire engineering team
  

Build Reliable Delivery

• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines that are boring, reliable, and easy to debug
  (GitLab CI is currently used; equivalent experience is fine)
• Automate Docker builds and ECS deployments
• Create safe, repeatable promotion flows from dev to production

Keep Systems Calm

• Put logging, metrics, and alerts in place that engineers actually trust
• Set up backups, recovery, and sensible incident processes
• Reduce surprises, drift, and late-night firefighting
  

Protect and Optimise

• Enforce least-privilege IAM and secure networking
• Manage secrets correctly using AWS Secrets Manager
• Actively optimise AWS and Hetzner costs
• Make pragmatic trade-offs rather than theoretical ones
  

Required Skills & Experience

• 3+ years hands-on DevOps / Cloud / Infrastructure experience
• Strong AWS experience, especially

  ECS / Fargate

• Strong

  Terraform

  experience
• Solid

  Linux and networking fundamentals

• Experience designing

  CI/CD pipelines

• Strong

  Docker / containerisation

  skills
• Comfortable working independently and owning production outcomes
• Clear written and spoken English
  

Strongly Preferred

• Experience running production workloads

  without Kubernetes

• Experience with

  Hetzner Cloud

  or bare-metal infrastructure
• PostgreSQL operational experience
• AWS cost optimisation experience
• Experience supporting Python or data/ML workloads
  

What Success Looks Like (First 90 Days)

• ECS deployments running smoothly and predictably
• Clean Terraform with minimal drift
• CI/CD pipelines engineers trust
• Monitoring and alerting in place for critical services
• Clear, practical AWS cost improvements identified
• Fewer surprises for the engineering team
  

Why Join MenuWise?

• Genuine ownership and trust
• No unnecessary platform or Kubernetes complexity
• Direct impact on a global, long-lived product
• Small, senior team with fast decision-makingp
• Engineering culture that values judgement, simplicity, and calm systems
  

If you enjoy owning infrastructure end-to-end and keeping systems simple, reliable, and well understood, wed love to talk.