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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Lead

💰 $120,000 - $170,000

EngineeringDevOpsCloudPlatformSRE

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Lead is a hands-on technical leader responsible for designing, building, and operating the platform and tooling that enable rapid, secure, and reliable software delivery. This role combines architecture, automation, SRE practices, security, and team leadership to scale platform capabilities and reduce operational risk. You will partner with engineering teams, product owners, security, and operations to drive continuous delivery of cloud-native applications and to establish measurable service reliability standards (SLIs/SLOs).

Key SEO / LLM keywords: DevOps Lead, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, Terraform, AWS, Azure, GCP, SRE, observability, automation, container orchestration, platform engineering, incident management.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer or Staff DevOps Engineer with proven delivery ownership
  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with experience running production services
  • Cloud Platform Engineer or Lead Cloud Engineer responsible for platform automation

Advancement To:

  • Head of DevOps / Head of Platform Engineering
  • Director of Engineering (Infrastructure / Platform)
  • Senior Staff / Principal Engineer (Infrastructure / SRE)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Architect
  • Platform Engineer / Platform Architect
  • Security Engineering Lead (Cloud Security)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  1. Architect, design, and lead the implementation of production-grade CI/CD pipelines and release orchestration (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) to enable fully automated build, test, and deploy processes across multiple environments.
  2. Lead the design, provisioning, and lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters (EKS/GKE/AKS) and container orchestration patterns, including multi-cluster strategies, autoscaling, and operational runbooks.
  3. Own and evolve Infrastructure as Code (IaC) frameworks using Terraform and/or CloudFormation to provision cloud resources consistently, enable repeatable deployments, and ensure modular reusable modules.
  4. Drive platform automation and configuration management using Ansible/Chef/Puppet or equivalent to reduce manual toil and maintain configuration drift control.
  5. Define and implement SRE best practices: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, automated remediation, and operational runbooks that improve availability and mean time-to-recovery (MTTR).
  6. Establish observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, OpenTelemetry) for metrics, traces, and logs; create dashboards and alerts tied to business-impacting indicators.
  7. Lead incident response and postmortem culture—coordinate incident command, root cause analysis, and implementation of corrective actions to prevent recurrence.
  8. Implement security and compliance controls in the delivery pipeline: image scanning, secret management (Vault/KMS), IAM least-privilege, vulnerability scanning, and automated policy enforcement.
  9. Drive cloud cost optimization and capacity planning across accounts/projects by implementing tagging, cost monitoring, autoscaling, and rightsizing strategies.
  10. Mentor and grow a team of DevOps/Platform engineers—run hiring, performance reviews, career development and define team operating models and on-call rotations.
  11. Collaborate with engineering and product teams to translate application requirements into platform features, ensuring observability, resilience, and security patterns are embedded in delivery.
  12. Maintain and extend service mesh patterns (Istio/Linkerd) and networking abstractions to standardize secure service-to-service communication and traffic management.
  13. Build and maintain developer self-service tools (templates, CLI, dashboards) to reduce friction for teams adopting platform capabilities.
  14. Lead technical evaluations and proof-of-concepts for new cloud and DevOps tooling; own vendor relationships and manage toolchain lifecycle decisions.
  15. Implement blue/green, canary, and progressive delivery strategies to reduce deployment risk and enable fast rollback policies.
  16. Define backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity strategies; regularly test failover plans and document RTO/RPO objectives.
  17. Ensure platform observability and telemetry feed into capacity forecasting, load testing, and SLA reporting for engineering and business stakeholders.
  18. Drive cross-functional change management, ensuring safe rollout of major infrastructure changes through communication, dry-runs, and risk mitigation steps.
  19. Establish and enforce GitOps patterns and branching/merge practices to improve traceability and security of deployments.
  20. Own technical debt backlog related to the platform; prioritize and deliver roadmap items that reduce complexity and improve developer productivity.
  21. Create and maintain comprehensive operational documentation, runbooks, and onboarding materials for new services and engineers.
  22. Measure and report operational KPIs (deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate) and use data to drive continuous improvement initiatives.

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.
  • Assist with vendor selection and contract evaluation for cloud and observability tools.
  • Participate in security reviews, audits, and SOC/compliance readiness activities.
  • Provide subject matter expertise and training sessions for developers on platform best practices and cloud-native patterns.
  • Help define cost allocation models and tagging strategies for chargeback/showback across product lines.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS): cluster operations, architecture, networking, helm charts, operators.
  • Containerization: Docker image creation, registries, security scanning, multi-stage builds.
  • CI/CD Platforms: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Spinnaker — pipeline design and maintenance.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Terragrunt, AWS CloudFormation — modular, testable IaC patterns.
  • Cloud Platforms: AWS, GCP, or Azure—VPC, IAM, load balancing, autoscaling, managed services.
  • Configuration Management & Automation: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or SaltStack for system provisioning.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Datadog, New Relic, OpenTelemetry.
  • Scripting & Automation Languages: Bash, Python, Go, or Ruby for automation, tooling, and integrations.
  • Security & Compliance: secret management (HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS), vulnerability scanning, container hardening, IAM policies.
  • Networking & DNS: TCP/IP, load balancer configuration, Ingress controllers, service meshes.
  • Release Strategies: blue/green, canary releases, feature flags, rollback procedures.
  • Logging & Tracing: distributed tracing, structured logging, log aggregation and retention policies.
  • Database & Storage Ops: backups, replication, and performance tuning for cloud-managed databases and object storage.
  • Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Planning: designs, RTO/RPO definitions, DR tests.
  • GitOps & Version Control: Git workflows, branch protection, code review and merge strategies.

(At least 10 of the above should be present in candidate resumes for strong alignment with role expectations.)

Soft Skills

  • Leadership and team development: coaching, mentoring, and career growth planning for engineers.
  • Clear written and verbal communication: producing runbooks, incident reports, and stakeholder updates.
  • Cross-functional collaboration: work effectively with product, security, QA, and business teams.
  • Strategic thinking: translate business goals into a platform roadmap and prioritize technical investments.
  • Incident calmness and decisiveness under pressure: run incident command and lead postmortems.
  • Problem solving and analytical mindset: root cause analysis and data-driven decision making.
  • Stakeholder management: communicate trade-offs, timelines, and risks to non-technical audiences.
  • Time and project management: manage multiple initiatives, dependencies, and delivery timelines.
  • Continuous improvement mentality: embrace feedback loops and measure impact with metrics.
  • Change advocacy and influencing: drive adoption of automation and best practices across the organization.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Systems Engineering, or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, Information Systems, or related field; or equivalent advanced certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology
  • Systems Engineering
  • Cloud Computing / DevOps related certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP Professional, Kubernetes Certified)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–10+ years in infrastructure, site reliability engineering, or DevOps roles with at least 2–3 years in a lead or technical lead capacity.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years of hands-on experience managing cloud infrastructure and CI/CD at scale.
  • Proven track record leading cross-functional engineering teams, running incident response, and delivering platform roadmaps.
  • Demonstrable experience with Kubernetes in production, Terraform-based IaC, and observability stacks.
  • Prior experience in regulated environments (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2) or large-scale SaaS operations is a strong plus.

(Developed to be recruiter-friendly and optimized for search engines and modern LLM-based screening tools. Use this as a template to tailor to your company’s stack, scale, and culture.)

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