DevOps Lead

About

The successful candidate will be responsible for leading the infrastructure, automation, and deployment strategies that enable our development teams to deliver high-quality software rapidly and reliably. This role requires deep AWS expertise and hands-on technical leadership in building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and development environments. The ideal candidate combines strong architectural vision with practical troubleshooting skills, capable of diagnosing complex application and infrastructure issues across our entire technology stack. This position will manage a team of DevOps engineers while remaining deeply involved as an individual contributor in technical implementation.

Essential Functions:

Infrastructure & Architecture

• Design, implement, and maintain AWS infrastructure across development, staging, and production environments
• Architect scalable, secure, and cost-effective cloud solutions using AWS services (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, VPC, IAM, CloudFormation/Terraform)
• Maintain and optimize on-premise infrastructure components as needed
• Implement infrastructure as code practices and maintain version-controlled infrastructure configurations

CI/CD & Deployment

• Build and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines using AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and GitLab CI/CD
• Create and maintain automated build and deployment scripts for .NET, Java, React, and Node.js applications
• Serve as Release Engineer, coordinating and executing deployments across all environments
• Implement automated testing and quality gates within deployment pipelines
• Manage Docker containerization strategies and container registries (ECR, private registries)

Operations & Troubleshooting

• Diagnose and resolve complex application performance issues, deployment failures, and infrastructure problems
• Provide production system support and participate in on-call rotation as needed
• Monitor system health using CloudWatch, DataDog, or similar monitoring tools
• Implement and maintain logging, alerting, and observability solutions
• Optimize application and infrastructure performance

Database & System Administration

• Administer and optimize MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB databases in both RDS and self-managed configurations
• Implement database backup, recovery, and replication strategies
• Perform database performance tuning and query optimization
• Manage database migrations and schema changes

Development Support & Collaboration

• Collaborate closely with development teams to understand and support their infrastructure needs
• Provide technical guidance on deployment best practices, cloud architecture, and DevOps methodologies
• Administer GitLab repositories including branch management, access controls, and workflow optimization
• Troubleshoot application issues across the full stack (Java, C#, React, Node.js)

Team Leadership

• Manage and mentor DevOps engineering team members
• Establish DevOps best practices, standards, and documentation
• Foster a culture of automation, reliability, and continuous improvement

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• This position has supervisory responsibilities.

Required Skills/Abilities:

AWS Expertise (Critical)

• Expert-level knowledge of AWS services including EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, VPC, IAM, CloudWatch, CloudFormation
• Proven experience architecting and implementing production AWS environments
• Strong understanding of AWS security best practices and compliance requirements
• Experience with AWS cost optimization and resource management
• AWS Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer certification strongly preferred

Technical Competencies

• Strong Linux system administration skills (RHEL, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux)
• Hands-on proficiency with multiple programming languages:
  • Java (build tools: Maven, Gradle)
  • C# / .NET Core (MSBuild, dotnet CLI)
  • Node.js (npm, yarn)
  • React (webpack, build optimization)
• Scripting languages (Bash, Python, PowerShell)
• Database administration and troubleshooting:
  • MySQL (required)
  • PostgreSQL (required)
  • MongoDB (highly desired)
• Experience with database performance tuning, replication, and backup strategies

DevOps Tools & Practices

• Expert proficiency with GitLab CI/CD or similar platforms (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, CircleCI)
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar)
• Docker containerization and orchestration (ECS, EKS, or Kubernetes)
• Configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet)
• Version control systems (Git) and branching strategies

Problem-Solving & Troubleshooting

• Excellent diagnostic and troubleshooting skills across application, infrastructure, and database layers
• Ability to quickly identify root causes of production issues and implement effective solutions
• Experience with application performance monitoring and optimization
• Strong understanding of networking, security, and distributed systems

Soft Skills

• Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Proven leadership and team management capabilities
• Ability to work independently and manage multiple priorities
• Strong documentation and knowledge-sharing practices
• Collaborative mindset with focus on enabling development team success

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related technical field
• 5+ years of hands-on DevOps/SRE experience in medium-to-large production environments
• 3+ years of AWS experience with demonstrated expertise in production workloads
• 2+ years of team leadership or management experience preferred
• AWS certification (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, or SysOps Administrator) strongly preferred
• Experience in financial services, healthcare, or other regulated industries a plus