Director, DevOps

Key Responsibilities Hands-On Technical Leadership Lead from the front: design and contribute directly to pipelines, release automation, deployment tooling, and observability instrumentation. Pick up the hard problems alongside the team. Own the technical direction for CI/CD, release engineering, and SRE practices across AWS, Azure, and on-prem workloads. Make architectural decisions for the delivery pipeline that span environments and product lines. Personally review designs, pull requests, and significant pipeline or automation changes; raise the technical bar through high-signal feedback and pairing. Set engineering standards — pipeline-as-code patterns, branching strategies, deployment patterns (blue/green, canary, feature flags), observability instrumentation — and ensure they are adopted in practice, not just documented. Team Leadership & Direct Management Directly manage a team of senior DevOps engineers and SREs, including hiring, performance management, growth, and compensation. Build a small, senior, high-trust team where leadership is shared and engineers operate with autonomy and clear ownership. Establish a culture of operational excellence, blameless learning, written communication, and disciplined engineering practice. Manage the on-call rotation as a participant when needed, not as an observer. Hold the team to a sustainable paging volume and meaningful post-incident follow-through. CI/CD & Release Engineering Own the end-to-end CI/CD platform supporting hundreds of microservices and applications, including pipeline-as-code standards, build artifacts, container images, and deployment automation across Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions. Drive measurable, sustained improvement in DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service. Standardize branching strategies, release patterns, rollback procedures, and pre-production validation gates across the portfolio. Partner with QE to embed automated testing — unit, integration, contract, performance, and security — into pipelines so that quality is enforced before production. Reliability & Incident Management Own the availability and performance of the production software the team is responsible for releasing. Define and maintain SLOs and error budgets for top-tier services, and hold both DevOps and product engineering accountable to them. Serve as incident commander for high-severity production events. Drive the root-cause analysis personally on the most significant incidents and ensure corrective actions ship. Own the observability practice for delivery: metrics, logs, traces, and synthetic monitoring that make production behavior visible to the teams that need it. Champion chaos engineering, game days, and disaster recovery testing in coordination with Cloud Engineering to validate resilience of hybrid systems. Security & Compliance Partner with Information Security to embed shift-left security into every pipeline: SAST, DAST, SCA, container and IaC scanning, secrets management, signed artifacts, and supply-chain controls. Manage secrets, certificates, and pipeline identity in coordination with Cloud Engineering and Information Security (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault etc.). Ensure pipeline and release controls satisfy compliance requirements relevant to mobility, payments, and government work (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, NIST, and similar); own engineering evidence for external audits. Strategy & Roadmap Own a 12–18 month roadmap for DevOps and SRE that balances reliability, security, developer experience, and delivery velocity; communicate trade-offs clearly to product and engineering leadership. Instrument and act on developer experience signals: time to first deploy for a new service, build and deploy times, friction surveys, and toil reduction. Drive modernization of legacy build, release, and deployment patterns; retire or consolidate redundant tooling rather than letting it accumulate. Translate DevOps investment into outcomes that executive leadership can act on — DORA improvements, SLO attainment, and concrete examples of developer-experience gains. Cross-Functional & Executive Partnership Partner closely with the Cloud Engineering leader as a peer; align on the boundary between cloud infrastructure (their domain) and the delivery pipeline and runtime reliability (this role’s domain), and present a coordinated story to engineering and product leadership. Partner with Software Engineering to ensure new services are built with pipeline, observability, and release templates from day one — not bolted on later. Partner with Architecture to align DevOps direction with the broader technology roadmap, including migrations between legacy and modern platforms. Translate platform reality into clear narratives for the CTO, CIO, and executive committee, including risk, investment trade-offs, and roadmap progress. Engage with sales, customer success, and key customers when delivery reliability, security, or roadmap intersects with customer commitments. Required Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent professional experience. 10+ years of progressive engineering experience in DevOps, SRE, or Release Engineering, including 4+ years in a leadership role directly managing senior engineers. Deep, current hands-on experience — you should be able to walk into a terminal, open a PR, and ship today. Recent leadership roles must include direct technical contribution, not just oversight. Demonstrated experience operating delivery pipelines and production systems at scale across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments, with a clear understanding of the operational and security trade-offs between them. Deep expertise in CI/CD platforms, specifically Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions (experience with Jenkins or GitLab CI a plus), including pipeline-as-code authoring, reusable templates, and self-hosted runner management.