Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. IDC is a global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for technology markets. The Principal of AI Operations & Infrastructure Automation will lead the transformation of infrastructure operations through AIOps, infrastructure-as-code, automation, and AI-informed operating models. The role combines hands-on technical leadership, team management, strategic vendor partnership, and accountability for measurable improvements in operational efficiency, resiliency, and incident response.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end redesign of the infrastructure operating model, moving core workflows (provisioning, monitoring, incident response, patching, capacity management) from manual execution to automated, self-healing pipelines
- Define a phased transformation roadmap with clear milestones, automation-coverage targets, and go-live gates — and drive execution against it at pace
- Lead change management for the infrastructure team through the transition — defining new roles, skills, and ways of working as automation is adopted
- Build the AIOps layer; evaluate, select, and deploy AIOps platforms and agentic tooling — anomaly detection, predictive alerting, automated remediation — suited to IDC's AWS-centric environment. Implement event correlation and noise reduction so a hundred alerts resolve into one actionable incident with a probable root cause attached
- Stand up LLM (large language model)-assisted triage that classifies, enriches, and routes incidents, pulling relevant runbooks, past resolutions, and change history into the ticket automatically
- Develop predictive capacity and failure models for critical services, and act on them before thresholds are breached
- Automate end to end, build and champion an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) standard across the organization, converting legacy manual processes into version-controlled, repeatable automation
- Deliver self-healing automation and closed-loop remediation for the highest-volume recurring incidents — restart, rollback, scale, reroute, and verify without a human in the loop. Automate service request fulfillment: access provisioning, environment setup, onboarding and offboarding, and routine change execution
- Own CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery-deployment) pipelines for operational tooling, including testing and safe rollback for automations that touch production
- Lead the team and prove the results Directly manage and develop a team of infrastructure and automation engineers — hiring, coaching, and setting technical direction — while staying hands-on in the tooling and code yourself
- Partner with AWS and other strategic vendors to pilot and scale automation and AI-driven operations capabilities, including Bedrock/AgentCore-based tooling where relevant
- Establish new operational KPIs — automation coverage, mean time to detect and resolve, deployment frequency, toil eliminated — and report progress in concise, executive-ready formats
- Set guardrails for AI in operations: human-in-the-loop thresholds, blast-radius limits, audit logging, evaluation of model output quality, and clear rollback paths
- Ensure automated operations meet IDC's security, compliance, and resiliency standards, working closely with Cyber & Compliance
Skills
- 8+ years in infrastructure, platform engineering, or IT operations, including 3+ years leading automation or AIOps initiatives
- Demonstrated track record of redesigning an operations function around automation — not just introducing point tools but changing how a team works
- Deep hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure automation (AWS strongly preferred), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar), and CI/CD pipelines
- Working knowledge of AIOps and agentic automation platforms, and a clear point of view on where AI genuinely improves operational outcomes versus adds noise
- Practical automation skill in Python or an equivalent language, including building integrations against REST APIs and operational tooling
- Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring platforms — Datadog, Splunk, Dynatrace, New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana, Elastic, or similar — including instrumenting services and building useful alerting
- Strong program leadership skills: able to define a roadmap, sequence dependencies, and hit aggressive milestones
- Excellent executive communication skills — comfortable distilling complex technical transformation into clear, concise updates for senior leadership
- AWS strongly preferred
- Experience operating in a regulated or compliance-sensitive environment (SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar)
- Prior experience partnering directly with a hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, or GCP) on joint automation or AI initiatives
- Background in site reliability engineering (SRE) practices and observability tooling
- Experience with agentic AI frameworks, RAG pipelines, or building internal AI copilots for technical teams
- Familiarity with ITSM platforms and process — ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or similar — and comfort automating against them
- Familiarity with FinOps practices and cloud cost automation
- Relevant certifications (cloud architect or engineer, Kubernetes, ITIL v4, Terraform)
Benefits
- 15 vacation days (prorated based on start date)
- 12 company-paid holidays
- 6 paid sick days (prorated based on start date; may vary by state)
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- 2 floating holidays (prorated based on start date)
- 1 volunteer day
- 401(k) company match (IDC matches 3% on the first 6% of employee contributions)
- Company-paid short-term disability
- Company-paid life insurance
- Company-paid parental leave
Company Overview
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