Senior DevOps Lead

About Devblock

At Devblock, we bring extraordinary people together to create world-class, game-changing web, mobile, and application software. Headquartered in Seattle, we are a global digital and software engineering consultancy offering end-to-end solutions—from ideation and strategy to creative content, software development, release management, and ongoing operational support and maintenance — for clients ranging from venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Despite our rapid growth to over 120 employees worldwide, we have proudly retained a boutique, family atmosphere where the passion for our work, our craft, and our clients is evident in every project we deliver.

Our teams, consisting of world-class architects, creatives, project and product managers, engineers, and, of course, our clients, are remarkably diverse — a core strength. We bring a wide range of valuable perspectives, experiences, and technical expertise to each project. And as a result, our solutions are more efficient, engaging and innovative.

In addition to our standard professional service client engagements, Devblock also operates in a “venture development” model, in which we undertake deeper, equity-based partnerships with our clients. We also undertake development of numerous in-house products of varying sizes, including our flagship Devblock product, a marketplace for software developers and clients to discover and manage engagements, as well as store reputations and project outcomes on an immutable, tamper-proof, and trusted blockchain.

Not only do we offer technical expertise, we’re adept at managing communications, timelines, and budgets for our clients. Whether designing a web site, mobile or backend application; fostering collaboration among teams; or striving to earn our clients’ trust; we put people first at Devblock.

What we need

The DevOps Lead role at Devblock is a hands-on position responsible for leading, overseeing, and coaching a team of DevOps engineers to ensure we build bulletproof, scalable, secure public cloud environments for our customers. Our clients are Fortune 500 enterprises who depend on us to design, develop, release, maintain, and support digital experiences and software solutions on their behalf, with the quality and uptime SLAs that are expected of the world’s leading brands.

The DevOps Lead takes ownership of the overall health and performance of our platform and services, working side-by-side with our development and security to improve the operability and security of our systems.

If you think hard is fun and get bored easily if you aren’t challenged, this might be the place for you. We want someone with an insatiable thirst for technology and a desire to learn and grow – individually, with the team, and with the business. Someone who has a passion to lead, architect, design, document, and implement comprehensive platform solutions using best practices. Someone who thrives in an environment in which they have the freedom to take full ownership and responsibility of an organization’s Devops, IT, and Information Security, working with the leadership team to create organization, process, discipline and rigor from a potentially initially ambiguous and chaotic environment.

This position would be the perfect fit for someone who wants to contribute and grow. You will have the unique opportunity to help drive innovation and technical excellence into all aspects of our various Cloud-based services and platforms. The technology stack you will be working on is hosted in AWS. You will be responsible for conceptualizing and delivering solutions in the space of end-to-end system architecture, automated builds, deployment, monitoring, and cloud infrastructure. 

Your Area of Focus

  • Provide hands-on technical leadership, guidance, and mentoring for the DevOps team
  • Hire, build, and develop high-performing DevOps engineers
  • Develop and improve our testing and deployment processes using AWS technologies
  • Architect, deploy and manage innovative modern cloud technologies using infrastructure-as-code, self-healing, and security automation patterns
  • Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code libraries and automation codebase
  • Engage with development teams to promote DevOps principles and best practices
  • Develop and maintain monitoring solutions, ensuring the reliability of our environments
  • Support production infrastructure and services, on-premise and in the cloud
  • Identify opportunities and implement solutions to further automate platform builds and processes
  • Collaborate with Development and the Clients to promptly investigate, debug and mitigate potential issues and outages
  • Use Chaos Engineering principles and methodologies to test what you build under real-world conditions
  • Promote automation to replace manual processes, and implement changes to improve processes and workflows
  • Management of integrated 3rd party services
  • Management of internal software, hardware and network support and procurement
  • Develop and maintain DevOps reference architectures for consumption by technical teams
  • Socialize DevOps reference architectures and provide guidance to ensure adherence to approved designs
  • Develop and maintain DevOps strategy and roadmap across people, process, and technology

Your Professional Qualifications

  • Provide hands-on technical leadership, guidance, and mentoring for the DevOps team
  • Proven experience leading, inspiring, coaching, and directing engineers working locally and remote
  • Ability to communicate and transfer knowledge clearly and effectively in technical and non-technical manners.
  • 5+ years of hands-on experience as an individual contributor in a systems administration/engineer/developer or DevOps role working on highly scalable distributed systems.
  • Experience designing, building, and managing mid to large-scale infrastructure in AWS and implementing, configuring, scaling, and managing various AWS services, including but not limited to CloudFront, VPC, ECS/ECR/Fargate/AKS, Serverless Stack (API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, RDS), EC2, ALB, IAM, Route53, EFS, S3, Elasticsearch, ElastiCache
  • Strong experience with Infrastructure As Code technologies (Terraform, CloudFormation, Troposphere) and configuration management (Ansible)
  • Strong experience with CICD (Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, GitLab CI)
  • Experience implementing software engineering practices for complete software development life cycles (SDLC), including coding standards, code reviews, source code management, build processes, and testing
  • Strong understanding of Akamai properties management
  • Hands-on experience with various monitoring and APM tools (e.g., NewRelic, DataDog)
  • Experience driving process improvements, with a strong focus on leveraging technology to establish fluid interactions and interfaces between teams.
  • Strong ability to prioritize and multi-task in a fast-paced environment.
  • Experience integrating third party service SDKs and APIs
  • Experience managing and supporting database environments