Lead DevOps Engineer

Remote (United States)

Job Details

Employment Type: Full-Time

Compensation: $165,000 – $205,000 annually, based on experience

About the Role

This opportunity is for a Lead DevOps Engineer to own and improve the environments, infrastructure, databases, deployment systems, and operational standards that engineering teams rely on to build and ship software safely and efficiently.

This is a player-coach role with approximately 60% of the time focused on hands-on engineering and operations and 40% focused on leadership, technical review, architecture, and team development. The position leads environment and platform work directly, sets standards for a small existing team of two engineers with room to grow, and is measured by how effectively engineering and product teams can ship without depending on a single individual.

What You’ll Do

• Design, provision, and govern all product environments, including production, staging, QA, development, prototyping, compliance environments, and database tiers, using Infrastructure as Code
• Ensure environments are reproducible, automated, and audit-ready rather than dependent on undocumented institutional knowledge
• Own and evolve existing CI/CD pipelines and design new pipelines from scratch for greenfield projects across every environment from commit through production
• Delegate pipeline work appropriately as the team grows while maintaining technical standards and delivery quality
• Steward database operations with the team, including backup and recovery, availability, capacity planning, and patching
• Operate the platform data layer deliberately without requiring deep DBA specialization
• Design infrastructure-level compliance reporting automation and reduce manual audit preparation
• Implement and maintain least-privilege access, break-glass access processes, and safe analyst read paths such as read replicas or sanitized exports
• Support compliance and audit requirements at the infrastructure layer
• Build and improve observability using CloudWatch so service-owning teams can troubleshoot their own systems
• Design monitoring, dashboards, and alerts that are actionable, routed to clear owners, and tied to meaningful production impact
• Reduce alert fatigue by eliminating noisy or non-actionable alerts and improving operational runbooks
• Coordinate release execution and environment readiness across internal engineering teams and external development vendors
• Set documentation standards for runbooks and infrastructure documentation that are readable by both people and AI-assisted systems
• Automate documentation wherever possible so operational documentation stays current
• Lead and mentor engineers responsible for platform and environment work
• Serve as the senior escalation point for production incidents
• Support junior engineers participating in standups and coordinating asynchronously
• Partner with application engineers to gather requirements early so environment and data constraints are designed into solutions rather than discovered late
• Design infrastructure solutions that address both technical requirements and broader business needs
• Create secure, compliant ways for product and engineering teams to prototype, test, and launch new capabilities quickly

How You Work

• Act as a team enabler and measure platform success by what other teams are able to deliver using it
• Document the environments and systems you own so knowledge is not concentrated with one person
• Remain effective in fast-moving environments where priorities may change quickly
• Bring practical alternatives when identifying technical risks or problems
• Design systems and processes that avoid creating a single point of control or knowledge
• Share access responsibly and support break-glass processes so the team is not dependent on one individual
• Respond constructively to difficult situations and keep discussions focused on solving the problem
• Be willing to disagree professionally and fully support the final decision once it is made
• Consider overall business objectives when recommending technical solutions rather than optimizing only for technical elegance

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or platform engineering roles
• 2+ years of experience leading the work of other engineers
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS
• Strong experience with Terraform or equivalent Infrastructure as Code technologies
• Strong experience designing, operating, and improving CI/CD systems
• Experience with containerized infrastructure; current environments use ECS/Fargate with ECR, and comparable container orchestration experience is transferable
• Experience building and managing environments end to end through code
• Experience designing infrastructure that supports production, staging, QA, development, prototyping, and compliance environments
• Strong experience with observability, monitoring, dashboards, alerting, and operational runbooks
• Ability to design alerting systems that are actionable, clearly owned, and aligned with service impact
• Working knowledge of relational database operations, including backup and recovery, availability, capacity planning, and patching
• Experience with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or managed relational database equivalents
• Deep DBA specialization is not required
• Data modeling and data warehouse experience are not required because application teams own schemas
• Hands-on experience supporting SOC 2 or similar compliance requirements within a regulated industry
• Experience designing access controls such as least-privilege permissions, break-glass access, and secure read paths
• Ability to support audit readiness and automate compliance evidence collection where appropriate
• Strong ability to coordinate releases and environment readiness across internal and external engineering teams
• Strong documentation skills with the ability to create clear runbooks and infrastructure documentation
• Strong leadership, mentoring, collaboration, and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in the legal industry is preferred but not required
• Experience working in regulated industries with strong security, privacy, and compliance requirements

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• Voluntary term life insurance
• Voluntary whole life insurance
• Voluntary long-term disability coverage
• Paid time off
• Paid holidays
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Maternity leave