Senior DevOps Engineer - PF Freelance - Americas/Europe

OVERVIEW:

We are defining the infrastructure and operational groundwork for a new ecommerce cart system. Our vision is to build a reliable, scalable, and secure platform to handle critical e-commerce operations for client stores.

We are seeking a devops consultant with expertise in e-commerce systems to help us finalize our infrastructure plan, suggest scalable service levels, and provide ongoing guidance on cost-effective system maintenance.

TIMEFRAME: Target one week to hire, but once we are confident we have the right person. The app launch is early next year so we are making decisions and acting quickly.

SCOPE OF WORK

1. Infrastructure Design and Validation
We have drafted an initial blueprint for our system based on the following stack:

• Core Application: Laravel.
• Infrastructure: Cloudflare for DigitalOcean for compute, managed Postgres, Redis cache, and S3-compatible storage (DigitalOcean Spaces).
• Edge Security and Optimization: Cloudflare for DNS, CDN, DDoS protection, and web application firewall (WAF), etc
• Deployment: Laravel Forge/Envoyer for CI/CD and deployment management.

Your role will include:

• Reviewing our current architecture to ensure scalability, reliability, and redundancy; and suggesting edits where needed
• Recommending best practices for an e-commerce system capable of handling high-availability requirements.
• Advising on monitoring/managing these effectively.

2. Service Levels and Ongoing Costs
We need your expertise to:

• Define service level options (e.g., uptime SLAs, disaster recovery guarantees).
• Provide recommendations for redundancy and failover mechanisms to meet varying levels of service quality(basic, advanced, enterprise).
• Estimate ongoing maintenance costs for hosting, scaling, backups, monitoring, and incident response under each service level.

3. Disaster Recovery Planning
We have an initial outline but need your guidance on:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) targets that align with e-commerce standards.
• Failover strategies, including handling data center outages, scaling across regions, and restoring from backups.
• Automation for recovery workflows.

4. Scalability and Monitoring
You’ll assist in:

• Designing strategies for scaling (vertical and horizontal) as traffic grows.
• Suggesting tools and processes for system monitoring, logging, and proactive alerts (e.g., Sentry, NewRelic, Slack notifications).

IDEAL TEAM MEMBER

We need someone with:

• Proven expertise in e-commerce systems and managing critical infrastructure for applications with high availability requirements.
• Hands-on experience with Laravel applications and DigitalOcean infrastructure (managed services like Postgres, Redis, and Spaces).
• Knowledge of best practices for CI/CD using tools like Laravel Forge/Envoyer.
• Strong background in cost optimization for cloud services without sacrificing performance or reliability.

DELIVERABLES

• 1) Infrastructure Plan: A reviewed and improved architecture that addresses scalability, reliability, and disaster recovery needs.
• 2) Service Levels: A tiered service model with detailed cost estimates for maintenance and operation. (So that we can balance needs against cost considerations.)
• 3) Operational Recommendations: Best practices for monitoring, logging, and proactive system health management.
• 4) Ongoing Role: Optionally take on a long-term System Administrator role to maintain and optimize the system as we grow.