Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Auction Technology Group (ATG) is transforming the global auction industry through online auction technology platforms that connect auction houses and buyers worldwide. The Staff DevOps Engineer will set the technical direction for infrastructure and platform engineering across eight marketplaces, leading cloud architecture, CI/CD standardization, infrastructure as code, observability, developer experience, and technical governance. The role will also develop senior engineers and influence engineering strategy through standards, roadmap ownership, and cross-functional collaboration.
Responsibilities
- Build/drive the 2-year Infrastructure Engineering technical strategy — defining what ATG's infrastructure and platform function should look like, what capabilities it will build, and what it will stop doing
- Author technical strategy documents and present them to engineering leadership for ratification. Be accountable for the choices, not just the authorship
- Identify which platform investments generate the highest leverage across all 8 marketplaces and build the case — in business risk language — for prioritisation
- Define the standards deprecation roadmap: which tooling divergences to resolve, in which order, and by when
- Continuously scan the industry for emerging infrastructure and platform engineering patterns. Bring informed, opinionated recommendations rather than a list of options
- Be the infrastructure technical partner to development squads — not embedded in one team, but accessible to all. Attend sprint planning and architecture reviews where infrastructure decisions are being made. Catch problems before they become production incidents
- Set platform policy — the guardrails within which development teams make their own infrastructure decisions. Enforce standards through technical review and well-written guidance, not mandate. A standard that developers don't adopt has failed regardless of how well it's written
- Communicate infrastructure constraints in developer language: frame IaC requirements, networking boundaries, and deployment patterns in terms of developer outcomes — speed, reliability, self-service capability — not infrastructure principles
- Be the escalation point when teams want to diverge from platform standards. Assess the risk, make the call, document the decision, and explain the reasoning in terms the requesting team can accept even if they disagree
- Represent Infrastructure Engineering in architecture review boards, engineering leadership forums, and cross-marketplace technical decisions
- Contribute to engineering-wide initiatives: hiring bar calibration, engineering principle definition, and company-wide technical decision forums
- Contribute to ATG's cloud infrastructure governance standards and guardrails — the patterns for compute, networking, storage, and managed services that development teams build against across AWS (primary) and Azure/GCP
- Involved in network architecture standards: VPC design, subnet strategy, traffic routing, load balancer configuration, CDN integration, and DNS architecture across marketplace environments
- Maintain the cloud infrastructure security posture standards: IAM design, secrets management architecture, network segmentation, and compliance guardrails (policy-as-code enforced, not advisory)
- Establish disaster recovery and business continuity standards — RPO/RTO targets, failover architecture, and runbook requirements — across all production environments
- Be a core contributor to ATG's CI/CD golden path strategy — define the direction and govern the standardized rollout across all 8 marketplaces (Q1–Q3 2027)
- Drive deployment lead time from 2.1 days to under 1 day within 15 months. Define the measurement framework, track progress, and course-correct
- Design reusable pipeline templates and abstractions that developers adopt with minimal friction. The quality test: a developer on a new marketplace should be able to ship their first pull request through the golden path pipeline within one day of onboarding
- Establish deployment quality gates: automated testing integration, change failure rate targets, and rollback trigger standards
- Define DORA metric targets for ATG and own the reporting framework used to track engineering delivery performance
- Define ATG's observability standard: unified logs, metrics, and distributed traces across all marketplaces using Dynatrace
- Set the SLO/SLA framework — the definitions, the thresholds, the review cadence, and the escalation model
- Make observability a developer capability, not just an ops capability: define instrumentation standards and golden path integrations so development teams can implement traces and custom metrics without requiring DevOps involvement for each service
- Govern implementation methods. Ensure the chosen stack is commercially sound, operationally viable, and adoptable by teams with varying maturity levels
- Establish alerting standards and mean time to detection targets
- Define ATG's developer experience strategy: what does a great day look like for a developer building on ATG's platform, and what is InfraEng's role in making that possible?
- Measure platform adoption quantitatively. Treat golden-path adoption as a product metric. Own the feedback loop between developer experience and platform investment decisions. Decline to invest in capabilities developers won't use
- Run architecture reviews for development squads: advise on infrastructure decisions, surface non-obvious constraints, and remove blockers that require senior technical authority to resolve
- Write infrastructure guidance that developers want to read: internal docs, runbooks, and decision records written at the right level of abstraction — detailed enough to be useful, brief enough to be used
- Contribute to the InfraEng roadmap with data-driven prioritization and a product mindset
- Actively develop the Senior engineers on both DevOps teams, everything from reviewing architectural designs, enforcing standardized processes, coaching technical influence and communication, and creating growth opportunities
- Define the engineering culture and standards you want the InfraEng team to embody. Model it in every design review, hiring decision, and team interaction
- Contribute to hiring bar calibration across the engineering organization. Participate in interview panels and provide structured, comparative feedback
- Write for internal audiences: technical strategy documents, engineering principles, decision records. Writing is a core leadership tool at Staff level, and the quality of your writing directly determines how much of your thinking survives contact with a distributed engineering organization
Skills
- Required 8+ years in Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering, or SRE, with at least 3 years in a senior or staff-level capacity
- Demonstrated experience owning a technical roadmap or multi-year infrastructure strategy at team or department level — not just contributing to one
- Proven ability to earn and maintain technical credibility with software engineers
- You have worked closely with development squads — in architecture reviews, sprint planning, or technical consultation — and developers have changed how they build things based on your guidance
- Track record of driving technical adoption across engineering organizations: setting infrastructure standards that other teams actually follow, and navigating the organizational dynamics required to make that happen without authority
- Experience influencing technical direction with senior stakeholders (Directors, VPs, or equivalent) through written strategy documents and structured verbal advocacy
- Deep cloud infrastructure architecture experience — AWS required: compute (EC2, ECS, Lambda), networking (VPC design, ALB/NLB, Route 53, CloudFront), storage (S3, EBS, EFS), IAM, and managed database services
- Multi-cloud (Azure/GCP) valued at this level, not optional
- Strong IaC background — Terraform required
- Ability to define module architecture, policy-as-code standards, and drift detection approach
- Deep hands-on experience designing and operating CI/CD platforms at scale (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Buildkite, or equivalent)
- Able to both set the strategy and validate the implementation
- Experience defining observability standards using OpenTelemetry or equivalent
- Familiarity with SLO/SLA frameworks and how to implement them operationally
- Proficiency in DORA metrics as a measurement and improvement framework — must be able to define targets and build the reporting infrastructure, not just interpret results
- Proficiency in at least one scripting or backend language: Python, Go, or TypeScript
- Kubernetes platform experience (EKS, GKE, or AKS) at the standard-setting level — able to define how containerized workloads should be structured and operated, and explain those standards to developers in terms they find useful
- Demonstrated ability to develop Senior engineers through design review, technical coaching, structured feedback, and growth opportunities
- Exceptional written communication: writes clear, precise technical guidance for developer audiences and clear, persuasive strategy documents for engineering leadership
- Can calibrate the same underlying concept to both
- Experience operating in a marketplace, e-commerce, or multi-tenant SaaS platform context
- Hands-on experience with ephemeral/preview environments (per-PR environments using Namespace.so , Okteto, or similar) at the platform design level
- Experience with policy-as-code frameworks (OPA, Sentinel, Checkov) as a platform governance mechanism
- Background in distributed, globally-distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones
- Public technical contributions: conference talks, published writing, open source maintainership, or internal thought leadership recognized outside the immediate team
- Experience in post-merger or restructuring engineering environments where infrastructure standards need to be established from scratch across multiple inherited systems
Benefits
- Annual performance bonus
- Stock
- Benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans
- Remote US
Company Overview