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Happy Saturday, everyone!
Quick story before I introduce this week's candidate.
Over the past few weeks, our recruiters interviewed two senior DevOps engineers based in the US. Both solid. Kubernetes, Terraform, the full stack.
The first quoted us $160–190K. The second wanted $200K+. (Glassdoor says they're not wrong — the US average for a senior platform engineer is $244K.)
That's the market. If your product runs on cloud infrastructure, that's the bill for keeping it online.
Here's the other problem: engineers at this level aren't on job boards. They don't post "open to work." They get poached… quietly, through referrals and direct outreach, usually before you ever hear their name. The same reason we can pull replies from engineers at top AI labs is the reason you can't find these people on LinkedIn: they only move when someone brings them the right opportunity.
Which is exactly how we found this week's candidate: a senior platform engineer in Eastern Europe, between engagements for about another week, at roughly a third of US market rate.
This week, he's the whole newsletter. He's earned it.
👉 Want to interview him this week? Book a free 30-min call with our recruiting specialists.
Meet The $200K Engineer Who Costs $7K/Month
I’m not going to tease you any longer. Here he is:
📍 Moldova | 💰 $7,000/month | Full-Time
Today’s candidate spent years supporting the monitoring infrastructure behind an enterprise B2B platform whose customers include McDonald's and Coca-Cola. When your software has to stay online for clients that size, "it works on my machine" isn't in your vocabulary.
He's currently wrapping up three simultaneous migrations (AWS to Oracle Cloud, monolith to microservices, VMs to Kubernetes), which is the only reason he's available at all. Engineers like this don't job-hunt; you catch them between projects, or you don't catch them.
Why you should hire him immediately:
Supported enterprise monitoring infrastructure serving McDonald's and Coca-Cola as end customers (Netreo/BMC)
Manages ~5,000 AWS resources entirely through Terraform — 100% infrastructure-as-code, zero manual changes, across multiple accounts, regions, and environments
Built a daily drift-detection system comparing live infrastructure against Terraform — eliminated config drift and created a full audit trail
Led a European expansion: reverse-engineered the company's entire US infrastructure and cloned it in Europe
Currently running 3 major migrations at once: AWS → Oracle Cloud, monolith → microservices, VMs → Kubernetes
Locked down developer AWS console access — all changes through Git and CLI only (your SOC 2 auditor will love him)
Led a DevOps team of 2–4 and unified CI/CD across backend, frontend, and mobile at Helium 10
Built a 50-server OpenStack private cloud from bare metal — he's worked every layer from physical servers to managed cloud
CI/CD tool-agnostic: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI — he adapts to your stack, not the other way around
Production Kubernetes has been half his workload for the past two years
Available immediately and has 10+ years of experience
Tools: Terraform, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Kubernetes, OpenStack, Docker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI
Strengths: Infrastructure as code • Cloud migrations • Kubernetes • CI/CD pipelines • Drift detection & audit • DevOps team leadership
Not your bottleneck?
Maybe you don't need a platform engineer. But the math above doesn't only work for DevOps. The same gap exists for ops managers, salespeople, developers, EAs, and the 30+ other roles we place every day from the U.S., Eastern Europe, South Africa, and LatAm.
👉 Want a senior DevOps engineer on a call this week? He can be interviewed within days; just reply to this email or schedule a free 30-minute discovery call below.
>>>> Book Your Free Call <<<<
Hiring for a different role? An SDR, Ops pro, Media Buyer? Reply to this email and tell us what you need. We'll show you what the market looks like for it.
Once-off flat fee. 120-day replacement guarantee. The downside is covered, and the upside is yours.
Until next time,
Nathan
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