Lead DevOps Engineer

Lead DevOps Engineer

As a Lead DevOps Engineer at Particle41 , you will own the DevOps strategy and the design, automation, and operation of the cloud infrastructure that powers our clients’ most complex digital projects. Working closely with cross-functional teams, you will champion DevOps culture and practices, set the standards other teams build on, and ensure the delivery of innovative and high-quality projects. Your role will also involve mentoring and coaching team members, fostering a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous learning.

In This Role, You Will:

Strategy & Practice Ownership

• Own the DevOps technical roadmap and vision, in collaboration with architects and stakeholders, and align it with business goals.

• Define the "golden path": reference architectures, reusable IaC modules, pipeline templates, and standards that teams across projects adopt.

• Be accountable for platform reliability, security posture, and delivery velocity outcomes across the engagements you lead; measured through SLOs, not just activities performed.

• Represent the DevOps practice with clients: participate in discovery and pre-sales conversations, estimate and scope infrastructure workstreams, and advise client leadership on cloud and platform decisions.

• Contribute to growing the practice interview and assess DevOps candidates, and help shape team structure and capability development.

Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

• Lead the design and implementation of cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.

• Architect and operate container platforms, including Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE) and managed container services, to support scalable, resilient workloads.

• Define landing zones, account/subscription structures, and network topologies that balance security, cost, and developer velocity.

• Evaluate and recommend platform tooling and managed services to support business requirements.

CI/CD & Automation

• Own the CI/CD strategy and pipeline architecture (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Jenkins) that makes releases fast, repeatable, and safe across teams.

• Drive an automation-first culture across build, test, deployment, and environment provisioning — setting the standard for eliminating manual toil, and staying hands-on where it matters most.

• Establish GitOps workflows (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux) for declarative, auditable deployments.

Reliability & Observability

• Define the observability strategy - monitoring, logging, and tracing (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry) and drive its adoption across teams.

• Own SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets in partnership with engineering and product teams, and hold teams accountable to them.

• Own incident response, on-call practices, and blameless post-incident reviews to continuously improve system resilience.

• Plan for capacity, scalability, and disaster recovery, including backup strategies and multi-region considerations.

Security & Cost Optimization

• Own the DevSecOps posture: define and embed security standards into the delivery pipeline — secrets management, vulnerability scanning, image signing, and policy as code.

• Support compliance initiatives (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA) with automated controls and evidence collection.

• Own cloud cost outcomes: drive right-sizing, autoscaling, and FinOps practices, and report spend posture to stakeholders.

Mentorship and Coaching

• Mentor and coach DevOps and software engineers to enhance their technical skills and expertise.

• Foster a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and continuous learning.

• Review infrastructure code and pipeline changes, providing constructive feedback to improve quality and maintainability.

Leadership

• Provide technical leadership and guidance on infrastructure, platform, and operational decisions.

• Lead by example through hands-on involvement in automation, tooling, and design discussions.

• Identify and resolve technical challenges to ensure project success.

Continuous Improvement

• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to enhance delivery processes and methodologies.

• Track DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore) and use them to guide improvements.

• Facilitate lessons-learned meetings to learn from past experiences and improve future projects.

• Stay up to date with industry best practices and standards in DevOps, platform engineering, and cloud operations.

Skills and Experience We Value:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field preferred.

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, including 2+ years leading teams or owning the DevOps function for multiple products or clients.

• Extensive hands-on expertise with at least two major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and a working knowledge of the third.

• Deep experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform strongly preferred) and configuration management (e.g., Ansible).

• Proficiency in scripting and automation with languages such as Python, Bash, or Go.

• Solid grounding in cloud security, IAM, networking, and compliance-driven environments.

• Strong leadership skills with experience in mentoring and developing engineering teams.

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate complex ideas clearly to technical and business audiences.

• Experience with agile development methodologies and a collaborative, client-facing mindset; comfort advising senior client stakeholders is a strong plus.

• Certifications in relevant technologies - such as AWS Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer Professional, Azure Administrator / DevOps Engineer Expert, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, or CKA - are a plus.

About Particle41…

Source: Jobicy (https://jobicy.com/jobs/161625-lead-devops-engineer)