Lead DevOps Engineer - Multi-Cloud Platform Career

Particle41; United States; Remote; USD 160,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Particle41 is seeking a Senior Lead DevOps Engineer to own the cloud strategy, design automation, and operate multi-cloud infrastructure for diverse client projects. You will guide platform engineering, set standards, and mentor teammates while delivering high-quality, scalable solutions.

With 8+ years across AWS/Azure/GCP, you will shape the DevOps practice, drive IaC adoption, and collaborate with architects and clients on governance, security, and performance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience across multi-cloud environments.
• Hands-on engineering plus practice leadership experience.
• Strong knowledge of IaC, CI/CD, and platform tooling.
• Experience with cloud cost governance and regulatory compliance.

Responsibilities

• Own the DevOps technical roadmap and vision with architects and stakeholders.
• Define golden path: reference architectures, reusable IaC modules, and templates.
• Be accountable for platform reliability, security posture, and delivery velocity.
• Represent the DevOps practice with clients in discovery and pre-sales.
• Mentor and coach DevOps engineers and shape team structure.
• Lead design and implementation of cloud infra across AWS, Azure, GCP with IaC tools.
• Architect and operate Kubernetes and managed container services for scalable workloads.
• Define landing zones and network topologies balancing security and velocity.
• Evaluate tooling and managed services to meet business needs.

Skills

Multi-cloud architecture

Platform engineering

FinOps & cost governance

DevSecOps & compliance

Client advisory & pre-sales

SRE & leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Pulumi

Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE)

Job description

Career Level & Market Position: This is a senior individual-contributor-to-lead role requiring 8+ years of experience across multi-cloud environments. It sits at the intersection of hands-on engineering and practice leadership — a relatively rare and high-demand profile in the market. Lead DevOps Engineers with multi-cloud, Kubernetes, and FinOps depth command $160,000–$220,000+ annually in the US; the lack of posted salary is worth probing in interviews.

Skills You’ll Build: This role is a career accelerator for anyone aiming toward Principal Engineer, VP of Engineering, or CTO tracks. High-demand skills developed include:

• Multi-cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP simultaneously — rare and valuable)
• Platform engineering and internal developer platforms (IDP) — a fast-growing discipline
• FinOps and cloud cost governance — increasingly board-level concerns
• DevSecOps and compliance automation (SOC 2, HIPAA) — critical in regulated industries
• Client advisory and pre-sales — a differentiating skill that opens consulting and leadership doors

Green Flags: The DORA metrics focus signals an engineering-mature culture. Blameless post-incident reviews indicate psychological safety. The consulting/agency context means exposure to diverse clients and tech stacks, which accelerates skill growth faster than single-product companies.

Yellow Flags: On-call ownership and client-facing accountability can blur work-life boundaries. No explicit mention of PTO, benefits, or compensation transparency is worth clarifying. The broad scope — from hands-on coding to pre-sales to hiring — suggests a lean team where you may wear many hats.

Verdict: Strong role for a senior DevOps engineer ready to step into an ownership position with significant technical breadth and client impact.

As a Lead DevOps Engineer at Particle41 , you will own the DevOps strategy and the design, automation, and operation of the cloud infrastructure that powers our clients' most complex digital projects. Working closely with cross-functional teams, you will champion DevOps culture and practices, set the standards other teams build on, and ensure the delivery of innovative and high-quality projects. Your role will also involve mentoring and coaching team members, fostering a culture of collaboration, automation, and continuous learning.

In This Role, You Will:

• Own the DevOps technical roadmap and vision, in collaboration with architects and stakeholders, and align it with business goals.
• Define the "golden path": reference architectures, reusable IaC modules, pipeline templates, and standards that teams across projects adopt.
• Be accountable for platform reliability, security posture, and delivery velocity outcomes across the engagements you lead; measured through SLOs, not just activities performed.
• Represent the DevOps practice with clients: participate in discovery and pre-sales conversations, estimate and scope infrastructure workstreams, and advise client leadership on cloud and platform decisions.
• Contribute to growing the practice — interview and assess DevOps candidates, and help shape team structure and capability development.
• Lead the design and implementation of cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.
• Architect and operate container platforms, including Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE) and managed container services, to support scalable, resilient workloads.
• Define landing zones, account/subscription structures, and network topologies that balance security, cost, and developer velocity.
• Evaluate and recommend platform tooling and managed services to support business requirements.

CI/CD & Automation

• Own the CI/CD strategy and pipeline architecture (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Jenkins) that makes releases fast, repeatable, and safe across teams.
• Drive an automation-first culture across build, test, deployment, and environment provisioning — setting the standard for eliminating manual toil, and staying hands-on where it matters most.
• Establish GitOps workflows (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux) for declarative, auditable deployments.

Reliability & Observability

• Define the observability strategy — monitoring, logging, and tracing (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry) — and drive its adoption across teams.
• Own SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets in partnership with engineering and product teams, and hold teams accountable to them.
• Own incident response, on-call practices, and blameless post-incident reviews to continuously improve system resilience.
• Plan for capacity, scalability, and disaster recovery, including backup strategies and multi-region considerations.

Security & Cost Optimization

• Own the DevSecOps posture: define and embed security standards into the delivery pipeline — secrets management, vulnerability scanning, image signing, and policy as code.
• Support compliance initiatives (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA) with automated controls and evidence collection.
• Own cloud cost outcomes: drive right-sizing, autoscaling, and FinOps practices, and report spend posture to stakeholders.

Mentorship and Coaching

• Mentor and coach DevOps and software engineers to enhance their technical skills and expertise.
• Foster a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and continuous learning.
• Review infrastructure code and pipeline changes, providing constructive feedback to improve quality and maintainability.

Leadership

• Provide technical leadership and guidance on infrastructure, platform, and operational decisions.
• Lead by example through hands-on involvement in automation, tooling, and design discussions.
• Identify and resolve technical challenges to ensure project success.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to enhance delivery processes and methodologies.
• Track DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore) and use them to guide improvements.
• Facilitate lessons-learned meetings to learn from past experiences and improve future projects.
• Stay up to date with industry best practices and standards in DevOps, platform engineering, and cloud operations.

Skills and Experience We Value:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field preferred.
• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, including 2+ years leading teams or owning the DevOps function for multiple products or clients.
• Extensive hands-on expertise with at least two major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and a working knowledge of the third.
• Deep experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform strongly preferred) and configuration management (e.g., Ansible).
• Proficiency in scripting and automation with languages such as Python, Bash, or Go.
• Solid grounding in cloud security, IAM, networking, and compliance-driven environments.
• Strong leadership skills with experience in mentoring and developing engineering teams.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate complex ideas clearly to technical and business audiences.
• Experience with agile development methodologies and a collaborative, client-facing mindset; comfort advising senior client stakeholders is a strong plus.
• Certifications in relevant technologies — such as AWS Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer Professional, Azure Administrator / DevOps Engineer Expert, Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, or CKA — are a plus.

About Particle41

Our core values of Empowering, Leadership, Innovation, Teamwork, and Excellence drive everything we do to achieve the ultimate outcomes for our clients — ELITE:

• E — Empowering: Enabling individuals to reach their full potential.
• L — Leadership: Taking initiative and guiding each other toward success.
• I — Innovation: Embracing creativity and new ideas to stay ahead.
• T — Teamwork: Collaborating with empathy to achieve common goals.
• E — Excellence: Striving for the highest quality in everything we do.

We seek team members who embody these values and are committed to contributing to our mission. Particle41 welcomes individuals from all backgrounds who are committed to our mission and values. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants, ensuring that hiring and employment decisions are based on merit and qualifications without discrimination based on race, color, religion, caste, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, local, or international laws.

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