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.

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.