Lead DevOps Engineer

About the Role

As our Lead DevOps Engineer at FoundingTeams.ai, you’ll be instrumental in designing, implementing, and maintaining scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines. This role involves mentoring a team of DevOps engineers, collaborating closely with development teams, and championing best practices in automation, monitoring, and incident response.

Key Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Architecture: Lead the design of cloud-native architectures for microservices and data platforms across AWS, Azure, or GCP. Define and enforce Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) standards using tools like Terraform or CloudFormation.
• CI/CD & Automation: Build and optimize robust, end-to-end CI/CD pipelines utilizing tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions. Automate testing, packaging, and deployment processes for containerized applications with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Monitoring & Observability: Implement comprehensive logging, metrics, and tracing solutions using platforms like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Datadog, or New Relic. Establish clear SLOs/SLIs, alerting mechanisms, and runbooks to support on-call rotations.
• Security & Compliance: Integrate security scanning (SAST/DAST) into pipelines with tools like SonarQube or Snyk. Enforce IAM best practices and manage secrets effectively using Vault, AWS KMS, or Azure Key Vault.
• Performance & Cost Optimization: Strategically right-size cloud resources, optimize autoscaling, and manage reserved instances to enhance efficiency. Conduct regular architecture reviews to proactively identify and address performance bottlenecks.
• Leadership & Mentorship: Coach and foster the professional growth of a team of DevOps/SRE engineers. Drive cross-functional training initiatives on essential DevOps tooling and practices.
• Incident Management: Lead thorough post-mortem analyses and continually refine incident response processes for ongoing improvement.

Required Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or similar infrastructure engineering roles.
• Cloud Expertise: Deep practical experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• IaC & Configuration Management: Proficiency with Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Pulumi; and Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.
• CI/CD: Demonstrated experience with Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI.
• Containerization & Orchestration: Strong command of Docker and Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS).
• Monitoring & Logging: Expertise with Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Datadog, New Relic, or equivalent platforms.
• Scripting & Automation: Proficient in scripting languages such as Python, Go, or Bash.
• Security Tools: Familiarity with Vault, AWS IAM, and security scanners like Snyk or Trivy.
• Networking Fundamentals: Solid understanding of VPCs, load balancers, DNS, CDN, and firewalls.
• Soft Skills: Exceptional communication and collaboration abilities across diverse teams, coupled with proven leadership in mentoring, conducting code reviews, and guiding best practices.

Nice-to-Haves

• Database Operations: Experience managing databases such as RDS, Cloud SQL, Cosmos DB, DynamoDB, or MongoDB.
• Serverless & Edge: Familiarity with serverless technologies like Lambda/FaaS, and edge services like CloudFront, Akamai, or Fastly.
• Observability Platforms: Experience with OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or Splunk.
• Cost-Management: Proficiency with tools like AWS Cost Explorer or Azure Cost Management.
• Certifications: Relevant industry certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

Key skills/competency

• DevOps Engineering
• Cloud Architecture
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Kubernetes Orchestration
• Infrastructure-as-Code
• AWS/Azure/GCP
• Monitoring & Observability
• Security Automation
• Team Leadership
• Incident Response