Lead DevOps Engineer - IFS Nexus Black

IFS; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible paid time off

401K with Company contribution

Flexible spending accounts

Life insurance and disability benefits

Tuition assistance

Community involvement and volunteering

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Nexus Black is building a platform engineering capability to run AI-powered solutions for industrial customers. You will own and evolve a secure, highly available platform used by multiple product teams, setting standards for reliability and deployment quality.

You'll design the infrastructure, lead a team of engineers, and enable product teams to deploy and operate services with minimal friction and strong security controls.

Qualifications

• Experience building cloud-native platforms at scale with Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of HA, fault tolerance, scaling and secure design.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot distributed systems.
• Experience with AI/ML or LLM workloads in production.
• Ability to explain technical decisions to non-experts.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and run cloud infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Own the Kubernetes platform with proper deployment models and resilience.
• Create CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows for reliable deployments.
• Drive security as the default across infra, pipelines and runtime.
• Build observability that informs action and dashboards for engineers.
• Lead and mentor engineers building on the platform.

Skills

Cloud-native platforms

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD

GitOps

High availability

Security by default

Troubleshooting distributed systems

AI/ML workloads in production

Technical decision communication

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes (GKE/containers)

CI/CD tools

GitOps pipelines

Observability tooling

Security tooling

Job description

Nexus Black builds AI to solve hard problems for the industries that keep the world turning: up
on power lines, down on factory floors, and out in the field.
We build products alongside our customers, for the specific problems they face. Like how
to wipe out downtime in a factory. How to navigate a maze of safety directives to make a
plane air-ready. Or how to turn the lights back on as fast as possible after a storm.

Job Description

About Nexus Black

IFS Nexus Black builds AI to solve hard problems for the industries that keep the world turning: up on power lines, down on factory floors, and out in the field. Our products - Resolve (field service and predictive maintenance), Flow (production planning), Comply (regulatory compliance) and Reason (analytical reasoning) - are used by technicians and engineers who cannot afford a tool that doesn’t work first time. We pair 40 years of IFS industrial depth with the technical pace of a start-up, and we get results in weeks, not months.

The role

You’ll own and evolve the platform our products run on: secure, highly available, and effective in the ways that matter. This is building platforms, not firefighting. You’ll design the infrastructure and standards that let product teams deploy, operate and evolve services independently - and you’ll set the bar for reliability, security and deployment quality across the organisation.

What you’ll do

• Design, build and run cloud infrastructure as code with Terraform.
• Own the Kubernetes platform - GKE workload standards, deployment models, multi-zone resilience, resource limits and safe failure modes.
• Build CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows that make deploys unremarkable: rolling and canary patterns, rollback in minutes, deployment-related incidents at zero.
• Make security the default across infrastructure, pipelines and runtime. Our customers run mission-critical assets; their security teams ask hard questions, and your work is the answer.
• Build observability teams can act on - alerts that mean something at 3am, and self-service dashboards so engineers answer their own questions.
• Lead and mentor the engineers building on your platform, and work out what they’ll need in six months before they ask.

What We're Offering:

• Salary Range:$150,000-$185,000 plusbonus
• Flexible paid time off, including sick and holiday
• 401K with Company contribution
• Flexible spending accounts
• Life insurance and disability benefits
• Tuition assistance
• Community involvement and volunteering events

Qualifications

What you’ll bring

• Cloud-native platforms built and operated at scale: Kubernetes and containerised workloads, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), CI/CD and GitOps-style delivery.
• A deep grasp of how things fail: high availability, fault tolerance, scaling strategy, and secure infrastructure design.
• Strong troubleshooting across distributed systems - the judgement to find the fault when the traces don’t agree.
• AI/ML or LLM workloads in production, not a lab.
• The ability to explain a technical decision to someone who doesn’t share your vocabulary.

Nice to have

• Service mesh technologies (Istio or similar).
• Kubernetes Gateway API or modern ingress patterns.
• Redis, PostgreSQL, or managed cloud data services.
• Experience in industrial, field-service or other asset-heavy domains.

Additional Information

Why Nexus Black

You’d shape a platform engineering capability from the front rather than inherit someone else’s decisions. High trust, high autonomy, real production systems running AI our customers depend on - and a short line between the platform you build and a technician forty feet up a utility pole getting the right answer. Less talk. More impact.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. VEVRAA Federal Contractor, Equal Opportunity Employer