Principal DevOps Engineer | AI-Driven DevEx Platform

Guidacent; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Guidacent seeks a Principal DevOps Engineer to architect the CI/CD and AI delivery platform, elevating developer experience and setting reusable standards. You will drive IaC, cloud platform strategy, and AI-enabled automation across teams, while mentoring engineers and shaping cross-team technical decisions.

The role emphasizes hands-on DevOps, with an emphasis on AI tooling like Claude or Cursor, secure workflows, and cost-conscious tooling usage, ensuring scalable, reliable platform delivery.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE with senior ownership.
• Demonstrated experience architecting CI/CD and infra platforms across multiple teams.
• Strong CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or Azure DevOps.
• IaC across Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation and at least one major cloud.
• Hands-on containerization with Docker and Kubernetes at production scale.
• Scripting/automation in Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience defining observability/monitoring strategy (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).
• Regular AI usage to improve DevOps tasks, reviews, and tooling.
• Daily AI coding-tool usage (Claude, Cursor, etc.) as part of work.
• Track record of using AI to elevate engineering standards and paved roads.
• Some AIOps experience for monitoring, anomaly detection, or remediation.
• Genuine DevEx ownership and mentoring ability.
• Proven ability to influence across teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture for CI/CD, infra, and the AI delivery platform.
• Lead DevEx as a long-term charter with a product-like roadmap and metrics.
• Define reusable templates, golden paths, and standards with AI tooling.
• Set patterns for using AI coding tools and improve reviews, tests, and automation.
• Design CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, validation, and rollback.
• Establish IaC and GitOps practices across multiple clouds.
• Drive organization-wide AI-assisted review, test generation, and AIOps adoption.
• Define observability strategy and apply AIOps to set SLOs and reduce MTTR.
• Embed security scanning, secrets management, and guardrails for AI tooling.

Skills

CI/CD architecture

DevEx leadership

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

AI tooling in DevOps

Cloud platforms

Docker & Kubernetes

Observability

Security & DevSecOps

Mentoring

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

CloudFormation

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Guidacent seeks a Principal DevOps Engineer to architect the CI/CD and AI delivery platform, elevating developer experience and setting reusable standards. You will drive IaC, cloud platform strategy, and AI-enabled automation across teams, while mentoring engineers and shaping cross-team technical decisions.

The role emphasizes hands-on DevOps, with an emphasis on AI tooling like Claude or Cursor, secure workflows, and cost-conscious tooling usage, ensuring scalable, reliable platform delivery.