DevOps Engineering Manager

Great to Meet You! We are Ascenda

Ascenda powers the growth of leading financial services brands worldwide with premium rewards programs that differentiate their products, drive profitable customer behaviors, and create sustained engagement.

We are behind the world-class rewards propositions of major banks and fintechs around the globe, including brands like American Express, Capital One, Brex, Revolut, Ramp, HSBC, Bank of New Zealand, Virgin Money (Australia), Bradesco (Brazil), ANZ (Australia), HDFC (India) and many others.

We are a thriving global Loyalty-as-a-Service company and are experiencing rapid expansion. Join our dynamic team contributing to the execution of our business strategies as we strive for hypergrowth. Our team spans 20 cities worldwide, with dual headquarters in Singapore and New York, totalling 270 team members.

Join us as a DevOps Engineering Manager in Singapore/Vietnam!

What we do

We're a small team of nice, experienced and (we think) fun folks. We treat our infrastructure as a product built for the developers who use it every day.

Our job is to make it easy for them to ship, run and observe their services: good paved roads, sensible defaults, and self-service tooling so teams can move without waiting on us. It's all managed as code with Terraform, running on Kubernetes across multiple AWS accounts and regions, built and deployed through automated CI/CD pipelines and Helm charts.

Grafana watches most of it. We're currently moving our CI/CD off Jenkins onto GitHub Actions.

We work closely with our developers and security teams, and we believe in "you build it, you own it." The platform is there to make that ownership manageable, not scary, by giving teams the guardrails and visibility to run what they ship.

We care about automation and quality, and we've hit the tougher security standards (PCI-DSS, SOC2, ISO27001). Our clients are financial institutions and airlines, so they expect high availability, reliability and security.

On a typical day we reach for Terraform, Istio, ArgoCD, Kubectl, Helm, GitHub Actions, Grafana, Cloudflare… to name a few.

The Role

We want someone to lead our growing DevOps team (6+ engineers today) who genuinely cares about cloud, systems, automation, reliability and security, with several years of hands-on experience in a similar stack. It's a player-coach role: you'll lead and grow the team, and while the role has a managerial aspect to it, we also expect you to acquire deep knowledge of our stack and contribute to it in a hands-on manner.

Your Impact

• Set and adjust the platform roadmap and priorities based on stakeholders input, but more importantly, working towards the company's infra/devops vision.
• Lead, mentor and grow the team, drawing on your own hands-on skills and experience.
• Help design and evolve the cloud platform powering our current and future services, with a strong bias toward self-service and paved roads.
• Champion the "you build it, you own it" culture, giving teams the tooling, observability and guardrails to own their services with confidence.
• Ensure our platforms run smoothly, reliably and securely to serve our customers, and that quality standards for infrastructure, code and documentation are met and delivered on reasonable timelines.
• Propose and drive improvements in scalability, automation, performance, CI/CD and self-service. We're absolutely looking forward to your suggestions!

Who You Are

• Several years of hands-on experience and battle-scars with AWS, Linux, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD and observability, plus experience managing complex architectures at scale.
• Experience managing a team of engineers and fostering cross-team collaboration.
• Solid systems and cloud fundamentals, with strong troubleshooting, problem-solving and analytical skills.
• A developer-experience mindset - you think about internal tooling and infrastructure as products with real users, not just systems to keep running.
• Networking, databases (we use Postgres and Redshift) and scripting/development background.
• A pragmatic view on cost and FinOps. You are comfortable driving efficiency gains while balancing them against reliability, velocity and delivery.
• A security-and-compliance-first mindset. You've worked in regulated or audited environments (e.g. PCI-DSS, SOC2, ISO27001) and treat security and compliance as built into the platform, not bolted on.

Why Join Ascenda?

Ascenda offers the unique opportunity to lead in LaaS, shaping the future of rewards programs. You'll be part of an environment that prizes groundbreaking ideas and their execution. We provide unparalleled career growth opportunities in a supportive and dynamic environment, complemented by a competitive compensation package that recognizes your impact.

Ascenda is dedicated to diversity and inclusion, welcoming candidates from all backgrounds. Join us on our mission to power the growth of the financial services industry by making loyalty simple and rewarding for everyone, everywhere.