Director of Engineering, Platform & DevOps

Job#: 3019325

Job Description:

We are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager, Platform & DevSecOps to lead teams building secure, reliable, and developer-friendly platform capabilities.

In this role, you will be responsible for platform strategy, people leadership (including managing tech leads), roadmap execution, and governance across CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes/containers, observability, cost optimization, and security-by-default practices. You will deliver at scale and partner closely with Product, Security, Data, and Application teams to create "paved roads" that accelerate the entire engineering organization.

Key Responsibilities

People, Organization & Leadership

• Build, lead, and grow a Platform & DevSecOps engineering team.
• Hire, coach, and develop engineers and technical leaders; attract and retain top talent.
• Establish career ladders, growth plans, succession planning, and performance expectations.
• Design sustainable on-call rotations and capacity planning practices.
• Foster a culture of ownership, inclusion, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Lead blameless postmortems and ensure follow-through on corrective actions.

Strategy, Roadmap & Stakeholder Partnership

• Own the platform strategy and multi-quarter roadmap aligned to business and product goals.
• Define and track OKRs that balance:
  • Developer velocity
  • Reliability and availability
  • Security and compliance
  • Cost efficiency
• Translate business priorities into measurable outcomes using metrics such as:
  • Lead time for change
  • Change failure rate
  • MTTR and MTTD
• Partner with Product, Security, Data, and Application leaders to define platform interfaces, SLAs/SLOs, and shared ownership models.

Platform Architecture & Governance

• Set technical direction for:
  • Build and release systems
  • Infrastructure automation
  • Kubernetes/EKS runtime platforms
  • Observability and monitoring solutions
• Establish platform guardrails, including golden paths, templates, reference architectures, and policy-as-code.
• Enable autonomy for product teams while maintaining compliance and operational consistency.
• Drive improvements in platform performance, availability, and cost efficiency.
• Own platform budgets, forecasts, and FinOps practices.

DevOps & Security Engineering

• Standardize CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins or similar), including:
  • Artifact signing and SBOMs
  • Progressive delivery strategies (blue-green, canary)
• Enforce security-by-design across build, deploy, and runtime environments:
  • SCA, SAST, and DAST integration
  • Secrets management
  • Least-privilege IAM
  • Network segmentation and runtime hardening
• Partner with Security to define remediation SLAs.
• Maintain audit-ready evidence supporting enterprise security standards and regulatory requirements.

Cloud Infrastructure & Reliability

• Operate secure AWS cloud platforms using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or Pulumi).
• Implement drift detection, change controls, and standardized deployment workflows.
• Define and enforce SLOs and error budgets for platform services.
• Lead incident response for platform systems and ensure post-incident actions are completed.
• Ensure multi-region resiliency where required, including backup/restore strategies and disaster recovery readiness.

Communication, Documentation & Change Management

• Publish and maintain clear, discoverable documentation such as:
  • Reference architectures
  • Runbooks
  • Platform standards and guidelines
• Communicate priorities, trade-offs, risks, and progress to executive and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Influence decisions using data, metrics, and operational insights.

What You'll Bring

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in Platform Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or Infrastructure roles.
• 4+ years leading engineers, including at least 2+ years managing tech leads or multiple teams.
• Proven experience delivering secure, reliable shared platforms serving multiple product teams.
• Strong Linux, networking, and systems troubleshooting fundamentals.
• Proficiency in Python and Bash for automation.
• Deep AWS experience, including:
  • EKS, ECS, EC2
  • RDS, DocumentDB, DynamoDB
  • IAM, VPC, and security groups
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS environments.
• Infrastructure as Code expertise (Terraform preferred; Pulumi a plus) with best practices for modularity, versioning, policy enforcement, and drift detection.
• Experience operating observability platforms at scale (logs, metrics, traces), alerting strategies, SLOs, and incident management.
• Strong security foundations across build, deploy, and runtime, including RBAC/ABAC, OAuth, SAML, OIDC, and secrets management.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS DevOps Engineer - Professional and/or AWS Solutions Architect (Associate or Professional).
• Experience with data platforms (e.g., Databricks), streaming or edge workloads, or hybrid/private networking environments.
• Experience managing vendors, budgets, contracts, and TCO/ROI analysis.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.

Apex Systems is a world-class IT services company that serves thousands of clients across the globe. When you join Apex, you become part of a team that values innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning. We offer quality career resources, training, certifications, development opportunities, and a comprehensive benefits package. Our commitment to excellence is reflected in many awards, including ClearlyRated's Best of Staffing in Talent Satisfaction in the United States and Great Place to Work in the United Kingdom and Mexico. Apex uses a virtual recruiter as part of the application process. Click for more details.

Apex Benefits Overview: Apex offers a range of supplemental benefits, including medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and other insurance plans that offer an optional layer of financial protection. We offer an ESPP (employee stock purchase program) and a 401K program which allows you to contribute typically within 30 days of starting, with a company match after 12 months of tenure. Apex also offers a HSA (Health Savings Account on the HDHP plan), a SupportLinc Employee Assistance Program (EAP) with up to 8 free counseling sessions, a corporate discount savings program and other discounts. In terms of professional development, Apex hosts an on-demand training program, provides access to certification prep and a library of technical and leadership courses/books/seminars once you have 6+ months of tenure, and certification discounts and other perks to associations that include CompTIA and IIBA. Apex has a dedicated customer service team for our Consultants that can address questions around benefits and other resources, as well as a certified Career Coach. You can access a full list of our benefits, programs, support teams and resources within our 'Welcome Packet' as well, which an Apex team member can provide.