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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Architect

💰 $130,000 - $200,000

DevOpsCloudArchitectureSREInfrastructurePlatform Engineering

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Architect is a senior technical leader who designs and drives the implementation of cloud-native, automated platform solutions that enable rapid, reliable software delivery at scale. This role blends cloud architecture, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), CI/CD pipeline design, container orchestration, observability, security and cost optimization to build a developer-friendly platform and reduce operational risk. The DevOps Architect partners with engineering, security, product and operations teams to define platform strategy, select tooling, and deliver production-ready infrastructure and runbooks.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer with cross-functional architecture experience
  • Cloud Architect or Cloud Engineer with strong automation background
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with platform ownership experience

Advancement To:

  • Head of Platform / Director of Platform Engineering
  • VP of Engineering or VP of Cloud & Infrastructure
  • Chief Cloud Architect / CTO for platform-focused organizations

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform Engineering Lead
  • SRE Manager / Head of SRE
  • Cloud Security Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architect and lead the design, implementation, and lifecycle management of multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud infrastructure, ensuring solutions meet availability, scalability, security, compliance, and cost objectives across development, staging and production environments.
  • Define and implement enterprise-wide IaC standards and patterns using Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi; author modular, reusable modules and enforce best practices for change management and drift detection.
  • Design and build resilient, automated CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD) that support blue/green and canary deployments, automated rollback and secure secrets management to accelerate release velocity while preserving production stability.
  • Lead Kubernetes platform strategy and governance: cluster provisioning and lifecycle (EKS, AKS, GKE, or on-prem), cluster scaling, multi-cluster networking, RBAC policies, network policies, and cost-aware cluster autoscaling.
  • Implement robust container lifecycle processes and standards for Docker images: image signing, vulnerability scanning, provenance, and secure image registries with image-building pipelines and caching strategies.
  • Build and integrate enterprise-grade observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK/OPENSEARCH) and logging/trace solutions to provide actionable SLOs/SLIs, dashboards, alerting and root-cause analysis for distributed systems.
  • Establish and operationalize platform-level security controls including identity and access management (IAM) policies, secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager), network segmentation, workload hardening and container runtime security.
  • Design and execute disaster recovery and business continuity strategies: backup and restore plans, cross-region replication, RTO/RPO targets and regular recovery testing.
  • Drive cloud cost optimization programs and governance: right-sizing, reserved instance/commitment planning, tagging, budgeting, and automated cost alerts and chargeback mechanisms.
  • Collaborate with application teams to define and implement service-level objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and incident response processes; author runbooks and postmortem templates and lead incident reviews to improve reliability.
  • Automate provisioning, configuration management, and system hardening using Ansible, Chef, Puppet or equivalent, while ensuring idempotent, auditable automation and minimal manual intervention.
  • Evaluate, select and integrate third-party SaaS and open-source tooling for CI/CD, secrets, monitoring, logging, artifact management, and service meshes, producing vendor comparisons and guiding procurement.
  • Champion platform-as-a-product mentality: create self-service developer workflows, onboarding documentation, templates, and internal marketplaces to reduce time-to-first-deploy and developer toil.
  • Design and implement network architecture for cloud and hybrid environments including VPC/VNet design, peering, transit gateways, private connectivity (Direct Connect/ExpressRoutes), load balancing and Egress/Ingress strategies.
  • Lead migration planning and execution for monolith-to-microservices, lift-and-shift and re-platforming projects with a focus on minimal downtime, performance benchmarking, and rollback strategies.
  • Define platform roadmap and technical standards, prioritize platform investments based on measurable KPIs and stakeholder value; present roadmap and architecture reviews to senior leadership and governance boards.
  • Mentor and coach engineering teams on DevOps best practices, IaC patterns, observability, secure-by-design principles and performance tuning; build internal training and certification programs.
  • Implement robust CI/CD security and compliance practices such as SAST/DAST pipeline integration, dependency scanning, policy-as-code (Open Policy Agent), and automated compliance checks for regulatory standards.
  • Create, maintain and enforce infrastructure and application deployment policies including tagging, change windows, approval flows, and safe roll-forward/roll-back mechanisms to reduce operational risk.
  • Establish metrics, dashboards and reporting for platform health, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, MTTR, and availability; continuously iterate to improve reliability and developer experience.
  • Lead cross-functional incident response for major outages, coordinate remediation, communicate status to stakeholders, and drive blameless postmortems and remediation plans to close systemic issues.
  • Own backup and data retention policies for platform services, including encrypted backups, lifecycle management, and regulatory-compliant data handling.
  • Provide architecture governance and guidance during design and code reviews, ensuring non-functional requirements such as scalability, performance, security and operability are addressed.
  • Act as the technical point of contact for vendor integrations and escalations, negotiate support SLAs, and manage relationships with cloud providers and platform vendors.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Produce and maintain comprehensive platform documentation, runbooks, runbook automation and onboarding guides to improve team self-sufficiency.
  • Participate in hiring, interviewing and developing DevOps and platform engineering talent.
  • Assist security and compliance teams with evidence collection for audits and certification efforts (ISO, SOC2, PCI, HIPAA where applicable).
  • Engage with developer communities and run internal brown-bag sessions to socialize platform capabilities and collect feedback.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (preferred), CloudFormation, Pulumi — design of reusable modules, state management and CI-driven deployments.
  • Container orchestration and runtime: Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD experience preferred), Helm, Kustomize; Docker image lifecycle management.
  • Cloud platforms: deep practical experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GCP) and working knowledge of multi-cloud patterns.
  • CI/CD and GitOps: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Flux — pipeline design for secure, compliant, automated deployments.
  • Configuration management and automation: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack or equivalent, with idempotent automation patterns.
  • Observability and monitoring: Prometheus/OpenTelemetry, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch, Jaeger/Zipkin, and setting SLOs/SLIs and alerting strategies.
  • Security tooling and practices: Vault, IAM, secrets management, vulnerability scanning (Snyk, Trivy), container security and policy-as-code (OPA).
  • Networking and infrastructure: VPC/VNet design, load balancers, CDN, DNS, service mesh fundamentals, private connectivity (Direct Connect/ExpressRoute).
  • Programming and scripting: Python, Go, Bash/PowerShell for automation, tooling, and integration.
  • Logging, tracing and metrics aggregation: centralized logging architecture, retention policies, tracing for microservices.
  • Storage and database operations in cloud: managed databases, backup/restore, replication and storage classes.
  • Cost management tools and governance: AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, FinOps principles and automation.
  • Disaster recovery and HA architecture: DR planning, RTO/RPO definition, cross-region replication strategies.
  • Testing and quality gates: SAST/DAST integration, dependency scanning, automated testing in pipelines.
  • CI/CD artifact and package management: Nexus, Artifactory, container registries and lifecycle policies.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic thinker with the ability to translate business goals into technical roadmaps and pragmatic delivery plans.
  • Strong communicator able to present complex architecture and trade-offs to executive and engineering audiences.
  • Proven mentorship and leadership skills, able to grow teams, drive culture change and foster cross-functional collaboration.
  • Excellent troubleshooting and incident management skills including calm leadership during high-severity incidents.
  • Customer-focused mindset with an emphasis on developer experience, platform usability and internal service-level satisfaction.
  • Strong prioritization and decision-making ability in ambiguous, high-impact environments.
  • Collaborative approach to stakeholder management, negotiation and vendor selection.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Cloud Computing, or MBA with technical focus.
  • Relevant professional certifications (AWS Solutions Architect Professional/Associate, Google Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, CKA/CKAD, HashiCorp Terraform Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Cloud Computing
  • Cybersecurity

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 7–15+ years in software engineering, systems engineering or platform roles, with at least 4–6 years focused on cloud, automation and platform architecture.

Preferred:

  • 10+ years with demonstrable leadership of platform, DevOps, or SRE initiatives at scale (multiple clusters, high availability, regulated environments).
  • Experience designing and operating production systems in public cloud environments (AWS/Azure/GCP) and managing platform migrations.
  • Proven track record of implementing IaC-driven workflows, GitOps, observability and security controls in multi-team organizations.
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