About you
You care deeply about reliability and understand the challenges of operating software in environments where connectivity, access, and deployment options can be constrained. You treat infrastructure and operability as products that deserve clear ownership, thoughtful design, and continuous improvement.
You're an effective people manager who sets clear expectations, gives useful feedback, and helps engineers grow. You build accountability through clear priorities and meaningful ownership, and you recognize when your team needs direction, support, or room to solve a problem.
You're comfortable managing a changing workload. You can turn competing requests into an actionable plan, account for operational interruptions, and explain what the team can commit to with its available capacity. You surface tradeoffs early and work with stakeholders to make deliberate decisions about scope and timing.
You bring calm and structure when priorities shift or incidents occur. You support engineers leading the response, help resolve escalations, and coordinate with customer-facing partners. You build a culture where engineers can surface risks early and examine failures honestly.
You have the technical judgment to help the team determine whether a recurring problem needs an infrastructure change, better automation, an application fix, or a clearer process. You bring the right people together to address it and ensure they have time to follow through.
What we look for
- An active Secret clearance
- 5+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or a related role, with substantial infrastructure and operations experience
- Experience directly managing engineers, including coaching, performance management, career development, and hiring
- Experience planning team capacity, prioritizing competing requests, and coordinating engineering work across teams
- A track record of delivering reliability improvements while managing ongoing operational responsibilities
- Experience with incident response and post-incident review practices, including helping engineers develop leadership and ownership
- Technical judgment sufficient to evaluate engineering proposals, understand operational risks, and guide prioritization
- Clear communication, including the ability to explain constraints and negotiate scope, timing, and commitments with stakeholders
Technical background
You should have practical experience operating production systems and enough breadth to guide engineers working across these areas:
- Infrastructure and automation: Infrastructure as Code, configuration management, and scripting, using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Python, Go, or Bash
- Containers and orchestration: Kubernetes deployment, troubleshooting, and operations
- Delivery practices: CI/CD pipelines, release safety, and repeatable deployments
- Cloud and on-prem environments: Operating software across AWS or AWS GovCloud and customer-managed infrastructure
- Observability: Monitoring, logging, and actionable alerting using tools such as the Grafana stack, ELK, or Datadog
- Networking and security: Core protocols, secure configuration, and connectivity troubleshooting
- Application reliability: Working with software engineers to diagnose application failures and evaluate infrastructure or code changes
We value depth in relevant areas and the ability to guide specialists across the rest.