Role Summary
The DevOps / Platform Lead is a strategic, hands-on role responsible for leading the design, implementation, and evolution of enterprise cloud infrastructure and developer platforms. The role bridges development and operations, driving the adoption of cloud-native technologies, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
You will lead a high-performing team of DevOps and Platform engineers, foster a culture of automation, and collaborate closely with Software Engineering, Security, and Product teams to ensure platforms are scalable, secure, resilient, and optimized for developer velocity.
Key Responsibilities
Team Leadership & People Management
- Lead, mentor, and inspire a team of DevOps and Platform engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and accountability.
- Manage resource allocation, project timelines, sprint planning, and team performance evaluations.
- Define career paths, establish clear objectives and key results (OKRs), and conduct regular one-on-one meetings to support team members' professional growth.
Platform Architecture & Strategy
- Define the long-term vision and roadmap for the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to reduce cognitive load on engineering teams and accelerate time to market.
- Architect scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure using best practices in microservices and containerization.
- Lead the migration from legacy infrastructure to modern, cloud-native architectures.
CI/CD & Automation Engineering
- Standardize, optimize, and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines across all environments to support safe, repeatable, and frequent deployments.
- Enforce Infrastructure as Code (IaC) as the foundational approach for environment provisioning and configuration management.
- Eliminate manual interventions by automating routine operational tasks and building self-service tools for developers.
Site Reliability & Observability
- Own the availability, performance, and monitoring of production environments, establishing and tracking critical service-level indicators (SLIs), service-level objectives (SLOs), and service-level agreements (SLAs).
- Implement comprehensive observability frameworks, including centralized logging, metrics collection, distributed tracing, and proactive [Needs hiring manager validation: the source wording ends with proactive averting].
- Lead incident response management, conduct blameless post-mortems, and ensure root causes are addressed to prevent recurrence.
DevSecOps & Compliance
- Partner with the Security team to integrate automated security scanning—including static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), dependency scanning, and container vulnerability assessments—directly into CI/CD pipelines.
- Manage and enforce identity and access management (IAM) policies, secrets management, and network security controls using the principle of least privilege.
- Ensure the platform complies with relevant industry standards and regulations, including ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA.
- Design, implement, and audit compliance controls across all cloud environments to ensure adherence to relevant industry standards and regulations.
- Lead the engineering team through internal and external compliance audits, ensuring documentation, system logs, and architecture diagrams are accurate and up to date.
- Enforce corporate governance policies, data retention practices, and disaster recovery (DR) compliance protocols.
FinOps & Cost Optimization
- Monitor, analyze, and optimize cloud infrastructure spending across all environments without compromising performance or reliability.
- Implement auto-scaling policies, right-sizing strategies, and data-retention lifecycle management to eliminate waste.
- Provide regular financial reporting and forecasts on cloud resource consumption to executive leadership.
Stakeholder Management
- Act as the primary liaison between the platform engineering team and key internal business units, including Product Management, Software Engineering Leads, Quality Assurance, and Executive Leadership.
- Gather requirements and feedback from internal development teams, treating developers as internal customers, to continuously improve the platform experience and developer velocity.
- Clearly communicate technical roadmaps, infrastructure risks, system availability reports, and the business value of DevOps initiatives to non-technical stakeholders.
Qualifications and Experience
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- 8–10 years of experience in DevOps, Cloud Engineering, or Systems Architecture.
- At least 3 years of experience in a managerial or team lead capacity, directly managing engineering teams.
- Proven experience designing and managing production infrastructure at scale on major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Strong background managing high-traffic, 24/7 production environments, with a focus on zero-downtime deployments.
Preferred Certifications and Knowledge
- Cloud Architecture: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional, Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect, or Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert.
- DevOps / Platform: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional or Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert.
- Kubernetes: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).
- Methodologies: Agile/Scrum certifications, such as CSM or PMI-ACP, and knowledge of the ITIL framework.
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