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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for DevOps Team Lead

💰 $120,000 - $170,000

EngineeringDevOpsCloudLeadershipPlatform

🎯 Role Definition

The DevOps Team Lead oversees the delivery, reliability, and evolution of the platform and operational capabilities that enable rapid, safe software delivery. This role balances strategic platform roadmap ownership with tactical, hands-on engineering: building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, container platforms (Kubernetes), observability, security automation, and production incident response. The DevOps Team Lead acts as a technical mentor, cross-functional partner to product and engineering teams, and the primary steward of platform reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior DevOps Engineer with proven delivery of platform services and CI/CD automation.
  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) who has owned production reliability and runbooks.
  • Cloud Infrastructure Engineer or Platform Engineer experienced in IaC and container orchestration.

Advancement To:

  • Head of DevOps / Head of Platform Engineering
  • Director of Engineering (Infrastructure & Platform)
  • Senior SRE Manager or VP of Engineering (Platform)
  • Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for smaller companies with platform focus.

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Architect (multi-cloud strategy and architecture)
  • Platform/Infrastructure Architect
  • DevSecOps Lead / Security Engineering Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the design, delivery, and continuous improvement of CI/CD pipelines and release orchestration to enable rapid, reliable, and auditable deployments across multiple environments (dev/stage/prod), using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or CircleCI.
  • Architect, implement, and maintain infrastructure-as-code (IaC) standards and modules using Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or similar, ensuring reproducible, versioned, and testable infrastructure provisioning across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
  • Own and evolve the Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS or self-managed) platform including cluster lifecycle, upgrades, capacity planning, multi-tenant isolation, helm charts, operators, and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, rolling updates).
  • Drive platform automation to eliminate manual toil: create scripts, operators, and automation frameworks (Python, Go, Bash) to provision environments, rotate credentials, and manage service lifecycles.
  • Implement and enforce observability standards: design logging, metrics, and tracing strategies using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Loki, Jaeger/OpenTelemetry to provide actionable alerts, dashboards, and SLO-driven monitoring.
  • Lead incident response and post-mortem processes: coordinate on-call rotations, run incident triage, perform root-cause analysis, document runbooks, and drive remediation to improve system reliability and reduce MTTR.
  • Define, implement, and evangelize platform security and compliance controls (DevSecOps): automate vulnerability scanning, IaC security checks, secret management, RBAC, encryption-in-transit & at-rest, and secure CI/CD pipelines.
  • Manage and mentor a team of DevOps engineers: recruit, set career goals, run regular 1:1s, provide technical coaching, establish coding and operational best practices, and foster a culture of learning and ownership.
  • Collaborate closely with product engineering, QA, and security teams to translate application requirements into platform features, service-level objectives (SLOs), and scalable infrastructure designs.
  • Plan and own the technical roadmap for platform services: prioritize initiatives (cost optimization, scalability, observability, developer experience), define milestones, and communicate progress to engineering leadership and stakeholders.
  • Create and maintain deployment strategies, release policies, and rollback procedures to minimize downtime and risk during releases, including staged rollouts and feature flags integration.
  • Optimize cloud costs and resource utilization: implement autoscaling, rightsizing, spot/preemptible instance strategies, and billing visibility to balance performance with budget constraints.
  • Standardize developer experience by building self-service platform APIs, templates, and internal tooling that reduce lead time for feature delivery and environment provisioning.
  • Establish and track platform KPIs: uptime, MTTR, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, error rate, and cost per service; use these metrics to drive continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Implement GitOps workflows to enable declarative infrastructure and application delivery, enforce Git as the single source of truth, and streamline auditability.
  • Lead cross-functional migration projects (monolith to microservices, data center to cloud, or single cluster to multi-cluster) with detailed risk mitigation, testing, and cutover plans.
  • Design and validate disaster recovery, backup, and business continuity plans, including recovery point objectives (RPOs), recovery time objectives (RTOs), and regular failover/drills.
  • Define and enforce configuration management and secret management practices using tools such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or SSM Parameter Store.
  • Drive observability and performance tuning activities at the application and platform layer, partnering with developers to identify hotspots and reduce latency or resource contention.
  • Manage vendor relationships and third-party platform services (managed K8s, logging, APM, CDN, DBaaS), evaluate solutions, negotiate SLAs and costs, and integrate them into the platform.
  • Create documentation, runbooks, onboarding guides, and platform playbooks for internal teams so new services and engineers can safely operate in production.
  • Coordinate compliance and audit readiness activities: provide evidence for security standards (SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR) and implement controls required for audits.
  • Oversee and participate in on-call rotations for critical platform services; proactively identify systemic issues to reduce on-call load and improve reliability.

Secondary Functions

  • Partner with product managers and architects to translate business priorities into scalable platform investments and secure infrastructure designs.
  • Support continuous improvement by facilitating blameless post-mortems, knowledge sharing, and retrospectives that feed into the platform roadmap.
  • Run periodic chaos testing and resilience exercises to validate failure modes and improve system robustness.
  • Coordinate with database and networking teams to ensure platform networking, DNS, and storage architectures meet performance and security requirements.
  • Deliver internal training sessions and workshops to raise developer productivity with platform best practices, IaC patterns, and Kubernetes usage.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Cloud Platforms: Proven hands-on experience architecting and operating services on AWS, GCP, or Azure; strong understanding of core services (VPC, IAM, EC2/GCE, S3, RDS/CloudSQL).
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Deep knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes (helm, operators, ingress controllers, network policies), cluster management and multi-cluster strategies.
  • Infrastructure as Code: Expert with Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi; ability to design reusable modules and manage state securely.
  • CI/CD & Release Engineering: Hands-on with Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Tekton, or Spinnaker and experience implementing automated pipelines and release gates.
  • Scripting & Automation: Strong in one or more scripting/programming languages (Python, Go, Bash) for automation, tooling, and integrations.
  • Observability & Monitoring: Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Loki, Jaeger/OpenTelemetry, Datadog, New Relic or similar APM/logging/tracing platforms.
  • Security & Compliance: Practical knowledge of DevSecOps practices — vulnerability scanning, secret management (Vault), RBAC, network security, and compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO, GDPR).
  • Networking & Systems: Solid understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, CDN, VPNs, Linux system internals, and performance tuning.
  • Configuration Management & Orchestration: Familiarity with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or Salt for OS-level configuration and automation.
  • GitOps & Release Management: Experience implementing GitOps workflows (Flux, ArgoCD) and managing declarative deployments.
  • Backup & DR: Design and implement backup, replication, and disaster recovery solutions; test recovery processes.
  • Cost Management: Cloud cost monitoring and optimization experience — tagging strategies, budgets, and usage analysis.
  • Database & Storage: Operational experience with managed and self-hosted databases, object storage, and caching layers (Redis, Memcached).
  • Testing & QA Integration: Integrate automated testing (unit, integration, load) into pipelines to ensure quality gates before production.
  • Platform Security Automation: Implement automated infrastructure security checks, IaC linters, container image scanning, and runtime protections.

Soft Skills

  • Leadership & People Management: Experience leading small-to-medium engineering teams, mentoring engineers, and conducting performance feedback and development planning.
  • Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills for technical documentation, stakeholder updates, and cross-team collaboration.
  • Strategic Thinking: Ability to create a multi-quarter roadmap, prioritize trade-offs, and align platform investments with business goals.
  • Collaboration & Influencing: Proven ability to work with product, QA, security, and business stakeholders to define requirements and gain buy-in.
  • Problem Solving & Incident Calm: Strong troubleshooting skills and the composure to lead during high-severity incidents and unexpected outages.
  • Coaching & Mentorship: Passion for developing engineers’ careers and promoting best practices, code reviews, and knowledge sharing.
  • Time Management & Prioritization: Balances immediate fire-fighting with long-term technical debt reduction and platform modernization.
  • Adaptability & Learning Agility: Keeps current with evolving cloud-native technologies and adapts processes and tooling accordingly.
  • Customer-focused Mindset: Understands developer experience and designs self-service tooling that improves productivity and reduces lead time.
  • Decision Making Under Uncertainty: Makes pragmatic, data-informed decisions where trade-offs exist and clearly communicates rationale.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Cloud Computing, or MBA with technical focus.
  • Certifications such as AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Google Professional DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or HashiCorp Terraform Associate are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 5–10+ years in operations, site reliability engineering, or DevOps roles with progressive responsibility.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years of hands-on infrastructure and automation experience and 2+ years in a leadership role managing engineers, platform projects, or critical production services.
  • Demonstrable track record launching and scaling cloud-native platforms, leading incident response, and delivering secure, automated CI/CD systems.
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