Senior Devops Engineer/lead

Scalence; Morristown (NJ); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Scalence is seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to join our Infrastructure team, focusing on Kubernetes operations and automation at scale. You will own the health, scalability, and reliability of our clusters and mentor junior engineers while driving the development of tooling used by platform teams.

You will lead cluster upgrades, implement automation, and partner with service owners and leadership to improve observability and incident response across environments.

Qualifications

• 7-9 years in DevOps, SRE, or Infra Eng.
• Deep Kubernetes ops expertise across large multi-cluster environments.
• Strong programming/scripting in Python, Go, Bash.
• Advanced skills reading logs, metrics, and system state for diagnosis.
• Extensive experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Expert debugging skills across distributed systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication and ability to document and influence.
• Mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive the roadmap for Kubernetes cluster operations — lead upgrades, manage node groups, and maintain cluster health across environments at scale.
• Lead troubleshooting of production and non-production issues across multiple interdependent systems.
• Architect and lead development of internal tooling — automation (scripts, CLIs, controllers, operators).
• Drive automation strategy for operational workflows — replace manual runbooks with scripts and tools.
• Diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure blockers across clusters.
• Define and improve observability strategy with logging, metrics, and alerting.
• Set standards for issue tracking and triage; drive resolution and reporting practices.
• Partner cross-functionally with service owners, platform teams, and leadership.
• Lead on-call rotations and incident response; drive post-incident reviews and improvements.
• Mentor and upskill junior and mid-level engineers.

Skills

Kubernetes operations

Automation scripting

Cloud architecture

Mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Communication

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Ansible

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

Spinnaker

ArgoCD

Flux

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

Job description

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer to join our Infrastructure team, focused on Kubernetes operations and automation at scale. You will drive the strategy and own the health, scalability, and reliability of our Kubernetes clusters, while architecting and leading the development of tooling that platform and service teams rely on to manage infrastructure safely and efficiently. You will work closely with service owners, platform engineers, and tooling teams — and mentor junior engineers — to keep clusters running smoothly and to automate away manual, error-prone operational work.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Own and drive the roadmap for Kubernetes cluster operations — lead cluster upgrades, manage node groups (scaling, draining, replacement), and maintain overall cluster health across environments at scale.
• Lead troubleshooting of complex production and non-production issues — use kubectl, logs, metrics, and other diagnostics to identify root cause and resolve workload, node, and networking failures, often across multiple interdependent systems.
• Architect and lead development of internal tooling — design, implement, and maintain automation (scripts, CLIs, controllers, operators) that helps teams manage infrastructure more reliably and with less manual effort.
• Drive automation strategy for operational workflows — replace manual runbooks with scripts and tools that handle upgrades, remediation, scaling, and routine maintenance.
• Diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure blockers — debug deployment failures, node/pod scheduling issues, resource constraints, and misconfigurations across clusters.
• Define and improve observability strategy — instrument logging, metrics, and alerting to increase visibility into cluster health and reduce time-to-detect/resolve.
• Set standards for issue tracking and triage — author detailed bug reports capturing root cause, repro steps, and impact; drive issues to resolution and improve team-wide reporting practices.
• Partner cross-functionally with service owners, platform teams, and leadership — align on operational requirements, capacity planning, and upgrade/maintenance schedules.
• Lead on-call rotations and incident response, own post-incident reviews, and drive continuous improvement initiatives across the infrastructure org.
• Mentor and upskill junior and mid-level engineers, providing technical guidance and code/design reviews.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

Required

• 7-9 years of DevOps, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering experience.
• Deep, hands‑on Kubernetes operations expertise — cluster upgrades, node group management, and complex troubleshooting across large‑scale, multi‑cluster environments.
• Strong programming/scripting skills (Python, Go, Bash, or similar) with a proven track record of building, scaling, and maintaining automation and internal tooling used by multiple teams.
• Advanced skills in reading and interpreting logs, metrics, and system state to diagnose complex, cross‑system infrastructure issues.
• Extensive experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), including architecture decisions and cost/performance tradeoffs.
• Expert‑level debugging skills across distributed systems — able to trace failures from symptom through to root cause in highly complex environments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication — able to produce clear status updates, bug reports, technical documentation, and influence technical direction across teams.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.

Preferred

• Deep experience with infrastructure‑as‑code tools (Terraform, Helm, Ansible), including designing reusable modules/patterns for org‑wide use
• Strong familiarity with CI/CD systems (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker, or similar), including pipeline architecture Hands‑on experience with GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux) at scale
• Advanced experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog), including designing alerting/SLO frameworks
• Proven experience operating Kubernetes at scale across multiple clusters, regions, or environments , including capacity planning and disaster recovery
• Experience contributing to or leading architectural decisions for infrastructure platforms

TECHNOLOGIES YOU’LL WORK WITH

JD Focus on:

AWS, Linux, Kubernetes, python – individual go-getter, not a follower