Principal DevOps Engineer: AI-Driven Platform & DevEx Leader

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

Job summary

Guidacent is seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer to architect the delivery platform and DevEx, integrating AI tooling to raise engineering standards. This senior IC role involves setting standards, guiding cross-team decisions, and mentoring engineers while maintaining cost-conscious use of AI tools.

The ideal candidate has deep CI/CD, IaC, cloud, and observability expertise, and can lead with hands-on execution, including AIOps and secure DevSecOps practices.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in DevOps, platform engineering, or SRE with senior ownership.
• Experience architecting CI/CD and infrastructure platforms across multiple teams.
• Strong CI/CD experience with common tools (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps).
• Deep proficiency with IaC (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) and major clouds (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Hands-on containerization and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes in production.
• Scripting/automation in Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience defining observability/monitoring strategies (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK).
• Regular, hands-on use of AI to improve DevOps tasks, reviews, and tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture for CI/CD, IaC, and AI delivery platform.
• Improve developer experience (DevEx) and treat it as a product with metrics.
• Define reusable templates and paved roads for faster, safer delivery.
• Lead AI tooling adoption in daily workflow with cost-aware usage.
• Design and implement CI/CD pipelines with testing, validation, and rollback.
• Establish IaC and GitOps across one or more clouds.
• Drive AI-assisted reviews, test generation, and AIOps for quality and velocity.
• Define observability strategy with telemetry, logs, and anomaly detection.
• Embed secure AI usage, secrets management, and guardrails.
• Set reliability practices (SLOs, DORA metrics) and optimize costs.
• Mentor engineers and influence broader roadmap.

Skills

DevOps leadership

CI/CD expertise

IaC (Terraform/Pulumi)

Cloud platforms

Containers & Kubernetes

Scripting (Python/Bash/Go)

Observability & monitoring

AI tooling usage

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

CloudFormation

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Azure DevOps

Job description

Guidacent is seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer to architect the delivery platform and DevEx, integrating AI tooling to raise engineering standards. This senior IC role involves setting standards, guiding cross-team decisions, and mentoring engineers while maintaining cost-conscious use of AI tools.

The ideal candidate has deep CI/CD, IaC, cloud, and observability expertise, and can lead with hands-on execution, including AIOps and secure DevSecOps practices.