Director, DevOps

Position Overview

The Director, DevOps is a hands-on technology leader accountable for the strategy and the day-to-day execution of CI/CD, release engineering, and site reliability across our mobility business. The DevOps function operates in a hybrid environment that includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and on-premises data centers, in close partnership with the Cloud Engineering organization.

This is a working leadership role, not a layered management role. The Director leads a team of senior DevOps and SRE engineers directly — setting direction, designing the hardest pieces, writing and reviewing code, owning incidents, and shipping alongside the team. The right leader is energized by being close to the work, comfortable in a terminal and in front of executives in the same day, and uses that proximity to make better decisions faster.

Key Responsibilities

Hands-On Technical Leadership

• Lead from the front: design and contribute directly to pipelines, release automation, deployment tooling, and observability instrumentation. Pick up the hard problems alongside the team.
• Own the technical direction for CI/CD, release engineering, and SRE practices across AWS, Azure, and on-prem workloads. Make architectural decisions for the delivery pipeline that span environments and product lines.
• Personally review designs, pull requests, and significant pipeline or automation changes; raise the technical bar through high-signal feedback and pairing.
• Set engineering standards — pipeline-as-code patterns, branching strategies, deployment patterns (blue/green, canary, feature flags), observability instrumentation — and ensure they are adopted in practice, not just documented.

Team Leadership & Direct Management

• Directly manage a team of senior DevOps engineers and SREs, including hiring, performance management, growth, and compensation.
• Build a small, senior, high-trust team where leadership is shared and engineers operate with autonomy and clear ownership.
• Establish a culture of operational excellence, blameless learning, written communication, and disciplined engineering practice.
• Manage the on-call rotation as a participant when needed, not as an observer. Hold the team to a sustainable paging volume and meaningful post-incident follow-through.

CI/CD & Release Engineering

• Drive measurable, sustained improvement in DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service.
• Standardize branching strategies, release patterns, rollback procedures, and pre-production validation gates across the portfolio.
• Partner with QE to embed automated testing — unit, integration, contract, performance, and security — into pipelines so that quality is enforced before production.

Reliability & Incident Management

• Own the availability and performance of the production software the team is responsible for releasing. Define and maintain SLOs and error budgets for top-tier services, and hold both DevOps and product engineering accountable to them.
• Serve as incident commander for high-severity production events. Drive the root-cause analysis personally on the most significant incidents and ensure corrective actions ship.
• Own the observability practice for delivery: metrics, logs, traces, and synthetic monitoring that make production behavior visible to the teams that need it.
• Champion chaos engineering, game days, and disaster recovery testing in coordination with Cloud Engineering to validate resilience of hybrid systems.

Security & Compliance

• Partner with Information Security to embed shift-left security into every pipeline: SAST, DAST, SCA, container and IaC scanning, secrets management, signed artifacts, and supply-chain controls.
• Manage secrets, certificates, and pipeline identity in coordination with Cloud Engineering and Information Security (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault etc.).
• Ensure pipeline and release controls satisfy compliance requirements relevant to mobility, payments, and government work (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, NIST, and similar); own engineering evidence for external audits.

Strategy & Roadmap

• Own a 12–18 month roadmap for DevOps and SRE that balances reliability, security, developer experience, and delivery velocity; communicate trade-offs clearly to product and engineering leadership.
• Instrument and act on developer experience signals: time to first deploy for a new service, build and deploy times, friction surveys, and toil reduction.
• Drive modernization of legacy build, release, and deployment patterns; retire or consolidate redundant tooling rather than letting it accumulate.
• Translate DevOps investment into outcomes that executive leadership can act on — DORA improvements, SLO attainment, and concrete examples of developer-experience gains.

Cross-Functional & Executive Partnership

• Partner closely with the Cloud Engineering leader as a peer; align on the boundary between cloud infrastructure (their domain) and the delivery pipeline and runtime reliability (this role’s domain), and present a coordinated story to engineering and product leadership.
• Partner with Software Engineering to ensure new services are built with pipeline, observability, and release templates from day one — not bolted on later.
• Partner with Architecture to align DevOps direction with the broader technology roadmap, including migrations between legacy and modern platforms.
• Translate platform reality into clear narratives for the CTO, CIO, and executive committee, including risk, investment trade-offs, and roadmap progress.
• Engage with sales, customer success, and key customers when delivery reliability, security, or roadmap intersects with customer commitments.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• 10+ years of progressive engineering experience in DevOps, SRE, or Release Engineering, including 4+ years in a leadership role directly managing senior engineers.
• Deep, current hands-on experience — you should be able to walk into a terminal, open a PR, and ship today. Recent leadership roles must include direct technical contribution, not just oversight.
• Demonstrated experience operating delivery pipelines and production systems at scale across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments, with a clear understanding of the operational and security trade-offs between them.
• Deep expertise in CI/CD platforms, specifically Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions (experience with Jenkins or GitLab CI a plus), including pipeline-as-code authoring, reusable templates, and self-hosted runner management.
• Strong working knowledge of container build, registry, and deployment workflows (Docker, ACR, ECR, Harbor) and Kubernetes-based deployments (EKS, AKS, or self-managed).
• Working knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code (Cloud Formation Templates, Terraform etc.) sufficient to collaborate effectively with Cloud Engineering on shared concerns such as deployment targets, networking for pipelines, and identity.
• Strong scripting and programming skills in two or more of: Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, or TypeScript/JavaScript. Comfortable reading and modifying code in any language the team encounters.
• Experience implementing observability tooling such as Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or Azure Monitor / CloudWatch.
• Track record of leading production incident response personally and driving measurable improvements to MTTR, change failure rate, and SLO attainment.
• Experience supporting compliance regimes such as SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, or FedRAMP, including engineering evidence for external audits.
• Clear, concise written communication. Comfortable engaging with the CTO, executive committee, and external customers, and equally comfortable in a design review or an incident bridge.
• Must comfortable with commute into office 3 days a week.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in mobility, transportation, tolling, parking, fleet, or other high-volume transaction-processing or IoT-adjacent industries.
• Experience leading large-scale CI/CD consolidation or modernization (e.g., Jenkins-to-GitHub Actions, monolithic-pipeline to pipeline-as-code).
• Familiarity with progressive delivery tooling (Argo CD, Flux, Spinnaker, LaunchDarkly, Unleash) and GitOps patterns.
• Active participation in the broader engineering community: writing, conference speaking, open-source contribution, or industry advisory roles.

What Success Looks Like

• Within 90 days: a current-state assessment of CI/CD, release, observability, and on-call practices across AWS, Azure, and on-prem, with a prioritized roadmap, named owners, and a clear point of view on what to keep, change, and retire.
• Within 6 months: visible technical contribution from the Director on the hardest delivery problems; standardized pipeline patterns adopted by the majority of service teams; documented SLOs for top-tier services and a mature incident response process.
• Within 12 months: sustained improvement in DORA metrics and SLO attainment; demonstrable reduction in MTTR; a small, senior, engaged team with clear ownership and growth paths; a healthy partnership with Cloud Engineering and a clear, shared model of responsibilities.