Senior DevOps Developer

Motion Recruitment; East Rutherford (NJ); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Motion Recruitment seeks a Senior DevOps Developer for a 6-month contract in East Rutherford, NJ. Hybrid work requires 3 days onsite weekly. You will own production CI/CD for a multi-team estate, lead platform engineering efforts, and drive modernization of delivery pipelines.

Ideal candidates bring 12+ years in software/infrastructure, hands-on Kubernetes/Helm, container tooling, IaC, and strong automation skills. Collaboration with cross-functional teams is essential.

Qualifications

• Extensive DevOps and platform engineering background required.
• Deep Kubernetes and Helm experience with OpenShift preferred.
• Expertise in container tooling: Docker, multi-stage builds, image hardening.
• Strong Build & CI/CD orchestration across multiple stacks.
• Experience with IaC: Ansible or Terraform at scale.
• Solid scripting in Python/Bash and production tooling.
• Artifact governance and security tooling in pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Standardise CI/CD templates and consolidate pipelines onto a declarative platform.
• Maintain Helm charts and values across environments and data centers.
• Own release paths with zero-downtime patterns on multiple runtimes.
• Deliver reproducible dev environments and reduce snowflake configurations.
• Manage code quality gates, artifact policies, and dependency remediation.
• Define SLOs, alerts, and capacity/cost visibility for platforms.
• Lead incident response, RCA and permanent fixes for platform-level issues.
• Mentor engineers and set engineering standards across teams.

Skills

Senior DevOps leadership

Production CI/CD ownership

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Kubernetes

Helm

OpenShift

Docker

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Ansible

Tekton

Prometheus

Grafana

AppDynamics

Dynatrace

CyberArk/Vault

Spark

Airflow

Job description

Grow your career as a Senior DevOps Developer with an innovative global bank in East Rutherford, NJ. Contract role with strong possibility of extension. Will require working a hybrid schedule 3 days onsite per week mandatory! Join one of the world's most renowned global banks and trusted brand with over 200 years of continuously evolving financial services worldwide. You will work alongside some of the smartest minds in the industry who are excited to share their knowledge and to learn from you. Contract Duration: 6 Months

Required Skills & Experience

• 12+ years in software/infrastructure engineering, with at least 5 years in a senior DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering role owning production CI/CD for a multi-team estate
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes and Helm — authoring charts, debugging workloads in production, managing multi-environment and multi-region deployments (OpenShift experience strongly preferred)
• Expert container tooling — Docker, multi-stage builds, image hardening, private registry management
• Cross-stack build expertise — Maven and Gradle (Java 17/21), npm/Nx (Node 22+), Python packaging (uv/pip, FastAPI services); able to diagnose a broken build in any stack
• Pipeline-as-code — Tekton-style declarative pipelines, Harness, Jenkins, GitHub Actions or GitLab CI, including reusable template design
• Infrastructure as code and configuration management — Ansible and/or Terraform at production scale
• Strong scripting and automation in Python and Bash; comfortable writing production-grade operational tooling
• Artifact management and dependency governance — Artifactory/Nexus, SonarQube, SAST/SCA, image scanning
• Observability in production — AppDynamics/Dynatrace, Prometheus/Grafana, centralised logging; on-call and incident command experience
• Secrets and identity — CyberArk/Vault, OAuth2/JWT service-to-service authentication, certificate and TLS lifecycle management
• Data platform operational exposure — Kafka, Spark, Airflow, and at least one distributed query/lakehouse technology (Starburst/Trino, Iceberg, or equivalent)
• Proven legacy pipeline migration — track record of modernising delivery pipelines without disrupting release cadence
• Excellent written communication — able to set standards that other teams willingly adopt and sustain

Desired Skills & Experience

• Financial services or regulated-industry experience — familiarity with change management, segregation of duties, audit evidence, and regulatory reporting platforms
• GenAI/LLM production operations — RAG pipelines, vector stores (pgvector, Chroma), agent frameworks, MCP servers, model gateway integration, token cost and latency management
• FinOps / cloud and on-premises cost optimisation
• Frontend delivery familiarity — Angular/Nx monorepos, Module Federation, design-system distribution
• Chaos engineering, DR and resiliency testing; performance and load engineering
• Certifications: CKA/CKAD, AWS/GCP/Azure professional-level, RHCE

What you'll be doing:

• CI/CD Standardisation
  • Own and evolve shared pipeline templates (pipeline.yaml tasks for Maven, Gradle, npm/Nx, Python, container image build, and Helm chart publish)
  • Consolidate legacy Jenkins/Harness pipelines onto the strategic declarative platform
  • Drive build times, flakiness rates, and pipeline success rates as tracked operational metrics
• Kubernetes & Release Engineering
  • Maintain Helm chart and values conventions across dev/SIT/UAT/prod and multiple data centres
  • Standardise probes, resource sizing, autoscaling, config/secret injection, and rollback procedures
  • Own promotion paths and zero-downtime release patterns on OpenShift/ECS and EKS
• Infrastructure as Code
  • Ansible for the Airflow/VM estate; Terraform-style declarative provisioning where applicable
  • Deliver reproducible developer environments and eliminate snowflake configurations and manual runbook dependencies
• Build & Dependency Governance
  • Manage Artifactory repository policy, JDK 17/21 and Node 22/24 toolchain currency, and the shared Gradle dependency BOM
  • Drive Renovate rollout and remediation of vulnerable or EOL dependencies across all 70+ repositories
• Observability & Reliability
  • Own AppDynamics, Prometheus/Grafana, and log aggregation standards across the platform
  • Define SLOs, alerting rules, capacity and cost visibility frameworks
  • Lead production incident response, RCA, and permanent-fix follow-through for platform-level failures
• Security & Controls Automation
  • Externalise secrets from code into CyberArk/Vault; enforce SonarQube quality gates and secure-coding checks in pipeline
  • Own image hardening, scanning, and audit evidence generation for regulatory review and compliance
• Data & AI Platform Enablement
  • Own deployment, scaling, and operational support for Spark batch, Iceberg/Starburst, Airflow, and JupyterHub
  • Support GenAI/RAG service operations — including GPU/model gateway access patterns, vector store operations, agent-service scaling, and token cost/latency management
• Developer Experience
  • Build and maintain golden-path templates for new services across all supported stacks
  • Ensure local build parity with CI; maintain platform documentation so teams self-serve rather than raise tickets
• Technical Leadership
  • Mentor engineers across the ERM programme; conduct design reviews and set engineering manifesto standards
  • Champion branch hygiene, PR etiquette, green builds, and SonarQube compliance across the estate
  • Represent the platform engineering function in architecture forums, risk governance, and regulatory audit engagements

Posted By: Melissa Klein