Team Scaling

• Zero ops tolerance. If it requires SSH, patching, monitoring, or on-call — you can’t use it.
• If it breaks at 3am, it waits until morning.
• One AWS account. No staging environment.
• Cannot operate anything with “cluster” in the name or anything requiring capacity planning.

Small Team (2-5 engineers)

• ~20% of one engineer’s time on infra (not a dedicated role)
• Alerts go to Slack, not PagerDuty — not enough people for on-call
• Can now operate: ECS Fargate, Aurora Serverless v2, basic IaC
• Cannot operate: EKS, multi-account, Transit Gateway, SOC2 program

Growth Team (5-15 engineers)

• Infrastructure lead at 50% time (not full-time dedicated)
• On-call rotation possible (minimum 4 people for sustainable rotation)
• Can now operate: ECS with EC2, ElastiCache, multi-account, VPC with subnets, Security Hub
• Cannot operate: EKS (unless deep K8s experience exists), multi-region active-active, service mesh

Platform Team (15+ engineers)

• 2-4 dedicated platform/SRE engineers justified
• Generic AWS service references apply without team-size filtering
• Platform team enables product teams — doesn’t gate them

When to Hire for Infrastructure

Counterintuitive Advice

Don’t hire a “DevOps engineer” at seed stage:

• Not enough infra to justify full-time role
• They will over-engineer because that’s their job
• You’ll end up with Kubernetes for a 3-service app
• Instead: hire product engineers comfortable with AWS + use managed services

Don’t wait until Series B for infra thinking:

• Years of accumulated tech debt by then
• Nobody understands the system holistically
• Hiring becomes harder (intimidating codebase)
• Right time for dedicated infra person: when incidents start costing users or revenue

Managed Services Cost Justification

Rule of thumb: At startup salaries ($150-250K/year = $75-125/hour), a managed service costing $500/month is cheaper than 7 hours of engineering time per month.

The smaller your team, the more managed services function as headcount replacement.