Lead DevOps Engineer

Salt Digital Recruitment; Dubai; On-site; AED 300,000 - 400,000; Full time

Job summary

Salt Digital Recruitment is seeking a Lead DevOps Engineer to establish automation and drive platform engineering practices. This hands-on leadership role involves defining and enforcing CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code standards, and ensuring strong compliance and security practices across operations.

The ideal candidate will have over 10 years of DevOps experience, with a significant focus on Kubernetes and OpenShift, as well as proficiency in CI/CD tools and cloud-native platforms. This position is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Qualifications

• 10+ years’ experience in DevOps / Platform Engineering, with 5+ years in a leadership role.
• Strong hands-on expertise in Kubernetes and OpenShift.
• Deep experience with CI/CD tools (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions).

Responsibilities

• Define and enforce DevOps standards across CI/CD, IaC, and container orchestration.
• Design, build, and operate Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters in hybrid and on-prem environments.
• Oversee incident management, runbooks, and automated remediation strategies.

Job description

Overview

My client is looking for a Lead DevOps Engineer to define and drive platform engineering practices that enable secure, scalable, and automated environments across data, AI, and application workloads. This is a hands‑on leadership role, responsible for setting standards across CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes/OpenShift, observability, and security, while ensuring engineering teams can deliver efficiently within a governed and resilient platform. You will act as a key bridge between Infrastructure, Security, DataOps, and Platform Engineering teams, helping to establish automation, reliability, and compliance as core principles across the organisation.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and enforce DevOps standards across CI/CD, IaC, and container orchestration.
• Design, build, and operate Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters in hybrid and on-prem environments.
• Own cluster lifecycle management, including upgrades, scaling, networking, storage integration, and resilience.
• Champion DevOps best practices across a hybrid architecture (Azure + on‑prem).
• Standardise and optimise CI/CD frameworks (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions).
• Drive adoption of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) across all environments.
• Enable automated, consistent, and scalable deployments across platforms.
• Establish observability frameworks (metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, alerting).
• Define SLOs/SLAs and ensure platform reliability and performance.
• Oversee incident management, runbooks, and automated remediation strategies.
• Embed security‑first practices including RBAC, secrets management, encryption, and vulnerability scanning.
• Ensure compliance with PHI/PII regulations through secure platform design.
• Support auditability and traceability across all deployments.
• Contribute to platform governance and design authority forums.
• Mentor and develop DevOps engineers, raising platform maturity and best practices.
• Collaborate with DataOps, AI/ML, and Engineering teams to support scalable delivery.
• Partner with Infrastructure and Security teams to implement shared services and guardrails.

Required Experience & Skills

• 10+ years’ experience in DevOps / Platform Engineering, with 5+ years in a leadership role.
• Strong hands‑on expertise in Kubernetes and OpenShift (cluster operations and lifecycle management).
• Deep experience with CI/CD tools (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions).
• Advanced knowledge of Terraform and Ansible (Infrastructure as Code).
• Strong Linux systems experience in hybrid and on‑prem environments.
• Experience implementing observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).
• Solid understanding of security frameworks (RBAC, secrets management, compliance).
• Proven track record delivering enterprise‑scale, cloud‑native platforms.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with data and AI platforms (Databricks, Kafka, Airflow, MLflow).
• Exposure to hybrid infrastructure (Azure + on‑prem storage such as MinIO or VAST).
• Experience contributing to architecture governance or design councils.

Please apply to be contacted with further information. Salt is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.