DevOps Manager

hackajob is collaborating with Leo Technologies to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role.

Job Description

Title: DevOps Manager

Summary/Objective

SUMMARY / OBJECTIVE

As DevOps Manager, you will lead the team responsible for the cloud infrastructure, automation, and delivery pipelines behind our public safety platform. You will pair hands-on technical leadership with people management, growing a high-performing team while ensuring the platform meets the availability, security, and regulatory demands of the agencies we serve.

Our production environment runs on Kubernetes in AWS, spanning both commercial and GovCloud regions, and makes heavy use of managed services. Because our customers include public safety and government agencies, our infrastructure operates under FedRAMP, CJIS, SOC 2, and NIST 800-53 expectations. You will own the intersection of engineering velocity and that compliance posture, making the secure path the easy path rather than a gate at the end of the pipeline.

TECHNICAL ENVIRONMENT

The following reflects our current stack. We are not looking for a checklist match on every item, depth in a comparable modern cloud-native environment matters more than familiarity with each specific tool.

Cloud: AWS across commercial and GovCloud regions; multi-account architecture with AWS Organizations, Control Tower, IAM Identity Center

Orchestration: Kubernetes on Amazon EKS, including autoscaling, ingress, service mesh, secrets management, and workload isolation

Managed Services: Amazon RDS/Aurora, MSK (Kafka), Elastic Cloud, S3, ElastiCache, Lambda, SQS/SNS, API Gateway, CloudFront, Route 53, KMS, Secrets Manager

Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (and/or equivalent), GitOps-based deployment workflows, policy-as-code

CI/CD: Automated build, test, security scanning, and deployment pipelines with progressive delivery practices

Observability: Centralized metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting; SLOs and error budgets

Compliance Posture: FedRAMP, CJIS, SOC 2 Type II, NIST 800-53 / 800-171

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS

Leadership & Team Development

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of DevOps and platform engineers, including regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development planning

• Recruit, hire, and onboard engineers; define role expectations and leveling criteria for the team

• Define and drive the team’s roadmap for infrastructure, CI/CD, and platform capabilities, and communicate progress and trade-offs to engineering and executive leadership

• Partner with engineering managers, architects, product, and security leadership to align platform investment with product delivery needs

• Foster a blameless, learning-oriented culture in which reliability and security are shared engineering responsibilities

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

• Own the design, operation, and evolution of our AWS environments across commercial and GovCloud regions, including account structure, networking, identity, and encryption

• Oversee Kubernetes (EKS) platform operations, cluster lifecycle, upgrades, capacity and autoscaling, multi-tenancy, and workload isolation

• Manage and optimize our use of AWS managed services including RDS/Aurora, MSK, Elastic Cloud, S3, and related components of the AWS ecosystem

• Drive infrastructure-as-code standards so that environments are reproducible, reviewable, and consistent across commercial and GovCloud boundaries

• Build and maintain self-service developer tooling and paved-road workflows that reduce friction for product engineering teams

Reliability & Operations

• Establish and continuously improve site reliability practices, including SLOs, on-call rotations, escalation paths, incident command, and blameless post-mortems

• Own availability, performance, and disaster recovery objectives; define and regularly test backup, failover, and recovery procedures against stated RTO/RPO targets

• Mature observability across the platform so that issues are detected and diagnosed before customers report them

• Drive automation initiatives that reduce manual toil and improve deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to restore

Security, Compliance & Governance

• Ensure infrastructure and deployment pipelines meet the control requirements of FedRAMP, CJIS, SOC 2, and NIST 800-53 / 800-171

• Partner with Security, Compliance, and GRC to prepare for and support audits and assessments, producing evidence, remediating findings, and maintaining continuous monitoring

• Implement compliance as code: automated control validation, configuration drift detection, vulnerability management, and hardened baseline images

• Maintain and improve identity, access, and least-privilege models, including separation of duties and access controls appropriate to CJIS-regulated data

• Ensure boundary integrity between GovCloud and commercial workloads, including data residency, personnel access, and FIPS-validated encryption requirements

Cost, Vendor & Program Management

• Ownership of cloud spend visibility and optimization strategy, including rightsizing, commitment planning, and unit-cost measurement

• Manage vendor and managed-service relationships, including contract, support tier, and renewal input

• Plan and coordinate cross-team infrastructure programs such as migrations, region expansions, and major platform upgrades

COMPETENCIES

• Technical Judgment. Makes sound architecture and operational decisions and knows when to go deep versus delegate.

• Problem Solving / Analysis. Diagnoses complex distributed-system issues calmly and methodically under pressure.

• People Leadership. Develops engineers, gives direct feedback, and builds durable, motivated teams.

• Communication Proficiency. Translates technical risk into terms executives, auditors, and customers understand.

• Security & Compliance Mindset. Treats regulatory obligations as engineering requirements, not paperwork.

• Ownership & Time Management. Prioritizes effectively across operational load, roadmap work, and audit cycles.

• Collaboration. Works as a partner to product and engineering teams rather than a gatekeeper.

REQUIRED EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• 5+ years of DevOps, platform, SRE, or cloud infrastructure engineering experience, including 2+ years directly managing engineers

• Deep hands-on experience operating production workloads on AWS at scale

• Strong production experience with Kubernetes, including cluster operations and application delivery patterns

• Proficiency with infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent) and modern CI/CD tooling

• Demonstrated experience with observability platforms, incident management, and on-call operations

• Working knowledge of at least one major compliance framework (FedRAMP, SOC 2, NIST 800-53, CJIS, StateRAMP, or similar) and how its controls map to cloud infrastructure

• Excellent written and verbal communication and stakeholder management skills

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Hands-on experience with AWS GovCloud, including the operational and architectural differences from commercial regions

• Direct experience supporting a FedRAMP authorization or continuous monitoring program (Moderate or High baseline)

• Experience in a CJIS-regulated environment, including personnel screening and access control requirements

• Experience carrying an organization through SOC 2 Type II audits

• Familiarity with Amazon MSK or self-managed Kafka, Elastic Cloud or the ELK stack, and Amazon RDS/Aurora at production scale

• Experience with FIPS 140-2/140-3 validated cryptographic modules and hardened/STIG-aligned baselines

• Experience building multi-tenant SaaS platforms serving government or public safety customers

• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer, Professional level), CKA/CKS, or security certifications such as CISSP

• Background in FedRAMP-authorized or otherwise regulated SaaS environments