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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Manager

💰 $120,000 - $180,000

EngineeringDevOpsCloudIT Management

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Manager is a hands-on engineering leader responsible for building and scaling a reliable, secure, and automated platform that enables rapid delivery of software across cloud and hybrid environments. This role combines people management, technical strategy, and day-to-day execution: you will oversee the platform and SRE teams, define the CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code strategy, lead cloud architecture decisions (AWS, Azure, GCP), and drive observability, performance, and security improvements. Ideal candidates are experienced in containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions), IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation), and have a proven track record of delivering resilient production systems and improving developer productivity.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer / Lead DevOps Engineer
  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Cloud Infrastructure Engineer or Platform Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Director of DevOps / Director of Platform Engineering
  • Head of Site Reliability Engineering / VP of Engineering (Platform)
  • Chief Technology Officer (for smaller organizations)

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Architect / Infrastructure Architect
  • Release Engineering Manager
  • Head of Observability / Security Engineering Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own the end-to-end platform roadmap, prioritizing reliability, scalability, cost-efficiency and developer productivity while aligning with product and business objectives across multiple engineering teams.
  • Lead, mentor and grow a high-performing DevOps/SRE team by providing coaching, career development plans, hiring, performance reviews, and building a culture of automation, blameless postmortems, and continuous improvement.
  • Design and operate production-grade CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or similar) to enable repeatable, auditable, and fast delivery of code from feature branch to production with automated testing and policy gates.
  • Architect and govern Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) standards, modules and pipelines to provision and manage cloud and on-prem resources consistently across AWS, Azure and GCP.
  • Lead the design, deployment and ongoing operations of container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes/EKS/AKS/GKE), including cluster lifecycle management, upgrade strategies, namespaces, and workload scheduling best practices.
  • Own the incident management process and drive the response to major production incidents: establish runbooks, on-call rotations, escalation policies, RCA processes and service-level objectives (SLOs) with error budgets.
  • Implement and maintain observability and monitoring platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK) to proactively detect issues, provide service health dashboards, and drive data-driven capacity planning.
  • Define and enforce security and compliance controls across the CI/CD toolchain and cloud infrastructure, including IAM policies, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, and compliance reporting (SOC2, ISO, PCI where applicable).
  • Drive automation to remove manual toil across build, deploy, and infra operations — leveraging scripting (Python, Go, Bash) and orchestration tooling to accelerate delivery and reduce mean time to recovery.
  • Collaborate with product, QA, and engineering leadership to design deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, feature flags) and ensure seamless release processes that minimize customer impact.
  • Manage multi-cloud architecture decisions, vendor relationships (cloud providers, managed Kubernetes, observability vendors), and negotiate SLAs and cost models to optimize spend and performance.
  • Establish platform-as-a-product thinking: gather developer feedback, provide self-service APIs and catalogs, and measure platform adoption and developer experience metrics.
  • Drive capacity planning, cost monitoring and optimization for compute, storage and networking across cloud environments by implementing tagging, budgets, autoscaling strategies and rightsizing programs.
  • Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, architecture diagrams and operational playbooks so teams can onboard quickly and reliably operate services in production.
  • Lead cross-functional initiatives to modernize legacy infrastructure, migrate workloads to the cloud or container platforms, and reduce technical debt with measurable milestones and rollback plans.
  • Enforce best practices for source control, branching strategies, dependency management, and release traceability to improve auditability and developer collaboration.
  • Implement a secure secrets and configuration management strategy using tools like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager or Kubernetes Secrets with appropriate access controls and auditing.
  • Drive observability-driven development: integrate tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), logging and metrics into application frameworks to enable performance tuning and effective troubleshooting.
  • Champion reliability-focused engineering principles: SLO/SLA design, error budgeting, automated remediation, and post-incident learning loops to improve system trustworthiness over time.
  • Oversee disaster recovery planning and exercises (DR drills, backup/restore validation), ensuring recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) are defined and met for critical services.
  • Serve as the primary liaison between engineering, security, product and business stakeholders for platform-related decisions, ensuring tradeoffs are communicated and technical debt is visible.
  • Track and report key platform KPIs to leadership, including deployment frequency, lead time for changes, MTTR, availability and infrastructure cost trends; use metrics to prioritize improvements.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc infrastructure and platform requests and collaborate with product teams on solution design and technical trade-offs.
  • Contribute to the organization's cloud and platform strategy, including migration plans, vendor selection and platform standardization.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate product requirements into operational requirements, SLAs, and SLOs that the platform must satisfy.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies to prioritize platform work, technical debt reduction and incident remediation tasks.
  • Coordinate cross-team knowledge sharing, brown-bags, and internal training to raise platform and cloud fluency across engineering teams.
  • Assist in the creation of onboarding programs and documentation for new engineers to reduce time-to-productivity on the platform.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud platforms: Advanced experience designing, operating and optimizing production systems on AWS, Azure and/or Google Cloud Platform (multi-cloud experience preferred).
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Deep familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes operations (cluster provisioning, autoscaling, ingress, RBAC, Helm, Operators).
  • Infrastructure-as-Code: Strong Terraform and/or CloudFormation expertise for modular, testable, and version-controlled infrastructure provisioning.
  • CI/CD Tooling: Hands-on experience managing Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI; knowledge of pipeline-as-code, artifact repositories and release orchestration.
  • Scripting & Automation: Comfortable writing automation and tooling in Python, Go, Bash or similar for task automation, tooling and custom integrations.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/EFK stacks and distributed tracing tools (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger).
  • Security & Compliance: Knowledge of cloud security best practices, IAM, secrets management, vulnerability scanning and experience with compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO, PCI).
  • Networking & Architecture: Solid understanding of VPC, subnets, routing, load balancing, CDN, DNS and service mesh concepts (Istio, Linkerd).
  • Release & Change Management: Proven ability to manage release windows, rollback strategies, feature flagging and deployment safety patterns.
  • High Availability & Resilience: Expertise in designing for fault tolerance, autoscaling, backup/recovery, DR strategies and capacity planning.
  • Observability-driven troubleshooting: Strong debugging skills of distributed systems and root-cause analysis for production incidents.
  • Cost management tools: Familiarity with cloud cost tools or native billing APIs and techniques for rightsizing, reserved instances, and cost allocation.
  • Configuration Management: Experience with Ansible, Chef, Puppet or similar for consistent configuration and state management across fleets.

Soft Skills

  • Leadership and team-building: proven ability to hire, mentor and retain technical talent while building a collaborative, accountable culture.
  • Cross-functional communication: excellent verbal and written skills for translating technical constraints into business-impacting decisions and vice versa.
  • Strategic thinking: ability to set a multi-quarter platform roadmap aligned to company priorities and measurable objectives.
  • Prioritization and execution: strong sense of focus to balance long-term investments (platform improvements) with short-term operational needs (incident response).
  • Problem-solving under pressure: calm and decisive during incidents with a bias for data-driven decisions and post-incident learning.
  • Stakeholder management: comfort engaging with senior executives, product owners and external vendors to influence and drive outcomes.
  • Mentorship and coaching: experience developing engineers in both technical skills and incident operations discipline.
  • Documentation and knowledge sharing: disciplined about runbooks, onboarding docs and internal training to reduce single points of failure.
  • Change management and diplomacy: ability to introduce new processes or tools while minimizing disruption and gaining team buy-in.
  • Vendor negotiation and partnership management: skill in selecting and managing third-party services to meet technical and commercial goals.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical Engineering or equivalent technical field OR equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing or MBA (for larger leadership roles), or equivalent advanced technical training.
  • Professional certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Terraform Associate are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Cloud Computing / Distributed Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 6+ years in DevOps, platform, or SRE roles with at least 3 years in a people/managerial role; total experience range often 6–12 years depending on company size.

Preferred:

  • Proven track record managing platform operations for SaaS or high-traffic consumer services at scale.
  • Experience leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams across regions and operating 24/7 production services.
  • History of successful cloud migrations, Kubernetes platform builds, or large CI/CD transformations with measurable improvements in deployment frequency and MTTR.
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