Principal DevOps Engineer

PRINCIPAL DEVOPS ENGINEER

Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Employment Type: Full-time

Work Model: Hybrid – 4 days office, 1 day work from home

Industry: Fintech / Digital Banking

Employment Type: Full-time

Level: Principal / Staff-level Individual Contributor

Language: Proficiency in both Vietnamese and English is required for daily business communication.

Our client is a fast-growing fintech company in Vietnam building and scaling a digital banking platform.

We are looking for a Principal DevOps Engineer to define and drive the infrastructure and delivery foundations behind the platform.

In this role, you will own the DevOps strategy across infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, reliability, and cloud efficiency. You will set the technical direction for how engineering teams build, deploy, and operate production systems at scale.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with significant technical influence across multiple engineering teams.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Define and drive the company's DevOps strategy, covering infrastructure, deployment, observability, reliability, and cloud efficiency.

• Architect and maintain stable, secure, and efficient infrastructure across production, QA, and development environments.

• Lead CI/CD and GitOps practices from build and packaging through deployment and continuous improvement.

• Drive DORA metrics, including lead time for changes, deployment frequency, time to restore service, and change failure rate.

• Standardize Infrastructure as Code practices using Terraform, Ansible, and Packer across engineering teams.

• Partner with Engineering, Security, and Compliance teams to ensure infrastructure meets banking-grade reliability and security requirements.

• Optimize cloud infrastructure and costs while maintaining scalability and performance.

• Establish and improve engineering standards for reliability, deployment, infrastructure, and operational practices.

• Mentor senior engineers and drive adoption of DevOps best practices across the organization.

• Provide technical leadership and influence across multiple engineering teams without direct reporting authority.

REQUIREMENTS

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, Infrastructure Engineering, or a closely related field.

• Previous experience at Principal, Staff, Lead, or equivalent technical leadership level.

• Proven experience operating production systems at scale.

• Experience driving infrastructure strategy, standards, and best practices across multiple engineering teams.

• Experience in fintech, banking, or another regulated environment is highly valued.

• Strong hands-on engineering capability combined with the ability to influence technical direction at an organizational level.

• Professional working proficiency in English, with experience collaborating across regional or distributed engineering teams.

MUST-HAVE TECHNICAL SKILLS

• AWS – particularly VPC, EC2, S3, Load Balancer, Route 53, and EKS.

• Kubernetes – strong fundamentals and hands-on experience.

• Linux – solid system administration and troubleshooting fundamentals.

• Networking – TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, load balancing, and general network troubleshooting.

• CI/CD and Git/GitLab.

• Docker / containerization.

• Infrastructure as Code – especially Terraform.

• Monitoring / Observability – SigNoz, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana/Loki stack.

• Scripting / Automation – Bash and/or Python.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL SKILLS

• Strong experience with GitLab CI/CD.

• Experience with GitOps, particularly ArgoCD.

• Hands-on experience with Helm, Helm Charts, and/or Helmfile.

• Experience with Ansible and Packer.

• Go or Java experience for internal tooling is a plus.

• Strong understanding of logging, tracing, monitoring, and system observability.

• Familiarity with HashiCorp Vault and secrets management.

• Strong understanding of infrastructure security best practices.

• Experience supporting databases and messaging systems at scale.

IDEAL CANDIDATE

• Builds influence through technical credibility rather than authority.

• Pragmatic and able to balance long-term architecture with short-term delivery.

• Comfortable shaping technical direction in ambiguous and fast-moving environments.

• Strong sense of ownership and operational rigor.

• Treats reliability as a first-class engineering concern.

• Able to operate at both strategic and hands-on technical levels.

BONUS POINTS

• Experience in fintech, banking, or other regulated industries.

• Hands-on experience with cloud cost optimization at scale.

• Background in Platform Engineering, SRE, or DevEx teams.

WHY JOIN

• Define the infrastructure foundations behind a fast-growing digital banking / fintech platform in Vietnam.

• Work alongside regional DevOps and Platform Engineering teams across Southeast Asia.

• Set the technical bar for how the organization builds, deploys, and operates at scale.

• Take ownership of major infrastructure and DevOps initiatives with significant technical influence.

• Work in a fast-moving environment where you can directly shape engineering practices and platform architecture.

Argyll Scott Asia is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.