DevOps Platform Lead

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.