IT Associate Director - Automation Engineering

Oculusit; New Haven (CT); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OculusIT is seeking an experienced Engineering Leader to drive infrastructure automation strategy and standards in a large-scale environment. You will architect cohesive automation ecosystems across multiple domains, lead lifecycle automation initiatives, and partner with infrastructure teams to embed automation into daily operations.

You will mentor a high-performing automation/platform engineering team, promote ownership and collaboration, and push continuous modernization while ensuring

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of relevant experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Significant experience in infrastructure automation, platform engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure leadership.
• Hands-on expertise with Ansible, Terraform, IaC, CI/CD, and configuration management.
• Demonstrated success implementing automation at scale across multiple infrastructure domains.
• Strong understanding of ITSM, change/incident/problem management, observability, SRE, and infrastructure reliability.
• Proven experience managing, mentoring, and developing technical teams.
• Strong program management, organizational, communication, and presentation skills.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute an enterprise-wide infrastructure automation strategy.
• Establish standards and architecture for IaC, CI/CD, configuration management, and automation frameworks.
• Build a cohesive automation ecosystem across infrastructure domains rather than siloed solutions.
• Lead the design and delivery of automated infrastructure lifecycle processes, including provisioning, patching, scaling, upgrades, and decommissioning.
• Partner with infrastructure engineering teams to embed automation into day-to-day operations.
• Drive repeatable, code-based infrastructure patterns and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices.
• Leverage automation to improve change reliability and safety.
• Patch and lifecycle compliance; incident response and recovery.
• Integrate automation with observability and monitoring platforms to generate actionable telemetry.
• Define and track metrics such as automation coverage, patch compliance, and automated change success rate.
• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing automation/platform engineering team.
• Coach engineers across experience levels and promote technical growth.
• Foster ownership, collaboration, engineering rigor, knowledge sharing, and continuous modernization.

Skills

Infrastructure automation leadership

Platform engineering

DevOps teams management

Ansible

Terraform

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

CI/CD

Configuration management

SRE

Observability

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/IT/Engineering

Tools

Ansible

Terraform

Job description

OculusIT is seeking an experienced Engineering Leader – Infrastructure Automation

Key Responsibilities

Automation Strategy & Architecture

• Define and execute an enterprise-wide infrastructure automation strategy.
• Establish standards and architecture for IaC, CI/CD, configuration management, and automation frameworks.
• Build a cohesive automation ecosystem across infrastructure domains rather than siloed solutions.
• Lead the design and delivery of automated infrastructure lifecycle processes, including provisioning, patching, scaling, upgrades, and decommissioning.
• Partner with infrastructure engineering teams to embed automation into day-to-day operations.
• Drive repeatable, code-based infrastructure patterns and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices.

Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Leverage automation to improve:
• Change reliability and safety
• Patch and lifecycle compliance
• Incident response and recovery
• Infrastructure resiliency and failover
• Integrate automation with observability and monitoring platforms to generate actionable telemetry.

Governance & Continuous Improvement

• Define and track metrics such as automation coverage, patch compliance, and automated change success rate.
• Establish governance around automation pipelines, infrastructure code quality, security, and tooling standards.
• Continuously identify opportunities to improve infrastructure efficiency and reliability.

Leadership & Team Development

• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing automation/platform engineering team.
• Coach engineers across different experience levels and promote technical growth.
• Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, engineering rigor, knowledge sharing, and continuous modernization.

Required Qualifications

• Proven experience leading infrastructure automation, platform engineering, or DevOps teams in complex environments.
• Strong technical knowledge across network, compute, storage, virtualization, cloud, and data center infrastructure.
• Hands-on expertise with Ansible, Terraform, IaC, CI/CD, and configuration management.
• Demonstrated success implementing automation at scale across multiple infrastructure domains.
• Strong understanding of ITSM, change/incident/problem management, observability, SRE, and infrastructure reliability.
• Proven experience managing, mentoring, and developing technical teams.
• Strong program management, organizational, communication, and presentation skills.
• Ability to identify complex problems, develop effective solutions, and drive execution.
• Experience managing multiple complex projects while meeting timelines and objectives.

Leadership Capabilities

The ideal leader will work closely with Infrastructure Engineering, TechOps, Information Security, Compliance, and other technology teams.

The candidate should demonstrate

• Strong technical communication skills with the ability to bridge engineering teams and senior leadership.
• Ability to influence and align teams in a decentralized/federated environment.
• Strong execution and program delivery discipline.
• Ability to translate strategy and vision into actionable roadmaps.
• Focus on accountability, measurable outcomes, and business impact.
• Strong change-management and stakeholder-management capabilities.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of relevant experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Significant experience in infrastructure automation, platform engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure leadership.