Staff DevOps Engineer

401 Cast & Crew LLC; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision coverage

401(k) match

Paid PTO

Parental leave

Tuition reimbursement

Employee discounts

Job summary

Cast & Crew is seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to own the design and evolution of CI/CD pipelines, EKS-based Kubernetes infrastructure on AWS, and developer tooling used by hundreds of engineers. You will operate with autonomy, resolve systemic issues, and raise the tech bar across teams.

You will lead platform reliability improvements with observability data, contribute to IaC practices, and mentor engineers while driving GitOps and deployment safety across a multi-team environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of DevOps or platform engineering experience.
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes experience (EKS preferred).
• Strong command of Azure DevOps Pipelines and YAML.
• Proven track record designing CI/CD for microservices with multiple teams.
• Experience with observability platforms (New Relic, Datadog).
• Proficiency in Python, Bash, or Go and IaC tools (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK).
• Familiarity with feature flags and progressive delivery.

Responsibilities

• Architect and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines across environments.
• Own health and evolution of AWS EKS clusters including upgrades and autoscaling.
• Design and enforce Infrastructure-as-Code practices; promote GitOps patterns.
• Drive platform reliability using observability data; work with SRE for improvements.
• Define golden-path templates for containerized workloads and development parity.
• Mentor senior engineers and drive platform capability through knowledge sharing.

Skills

Kubernetes

Azure DevOps Pipelines

CI/CD for microservices

Observability platforms

Scripting languages

Infrastructure-as-Code

GitOps patterns

Architecture reviews

Mentoring/leadership

Documentation

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

CDK

Azure DevOps

Helm

Docker

Kubernetes tooling

Job description

About Us At Cast & Crew, we’ve empowered creativity and supported the global entertainment industry for decades. Together with our family of brands - Backstage, CAPS, Checks & Balances, Final Draft, Media Services, Sargent-Disc, and The TEAM Companies – we operate as a combined entertainment technology and services provider offering industry standard screenwriting accounting software, digital payroll products, data & reporting, and a host of creative tools. The industry continues to move faster than ever, and the need for our expertise, our technology, and our people has never been greater. We are a production’s best ally every step of the way. #OneCastOneCrew

Position Overview

We are looking for a Staff DevOps Engineer to serve as a technical anchor for our platform engineering practice. In this role you will own the design and evolution of our CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes infrastructure on AWS EKS, and the developer experience tooling that hundreds of engineers depend on daily. Staff-level engineers at this organization are expected to operate with significant autonomy, identify and resolve systemic problems before they become incidents, and raise the technical bar across the teams they partner with.

Core Responsibilities

Platform & Infrastructure

• Architect and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps, including pipeline-as-code standards, templating strategies, and artifact promotion workflows across environments.
• Own the health and evolution of our AWS EKS clusters — node lifecycle, autoscaling, networking (VPC/CNI), RBAC, and cluster upgrades with minimal service disruption.
• Design and enforce Infrastructure-as-Code practices using Terraform or equivalent tooling; champion GitOps patterns across engineering teams.
• Drive platform reliability improvements informed by observability data from New Relic, working closely with SRE to translate dashboards and alerts into actionable platform changes.

Developer Experience

• Define and maintain golden-path templates for containerized workloads — Dockerfile standards, Helm chart libraries, and local development parity with production.
• Partner with engineering teams to accelerate onboarding of new services onto the platform and reduce toil through automation.

Incident & Operational Excellence

• Act as an escalation point for complex infrastructure incidents coordinated through PagerDuty; participate in on-call rotation and lead post-incident reviews for platform-layer failures.
• Identify recurring failure modes and drive systemic fixes that reduce page volume and MTTR across the platform.
• Maintain and improve runbooks and platform documentation in Confluence, ensuring knowledge is accessible and current.

Technical Leadership

• Define and socialize DevOps standards — pipeline design, container hygiene, secret management, and deployment safety — across a multi-team engineering organization.
• Conduct architecture reviews and provide technical guidance on infrastructure-impacting decisions made by product engineering teams.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers; grow internal platform capability through pairing, code review, and structured knowledge sharing.
• Identify tooling gaps and build the business case for platform investments, working with engineering leadership to prioritize roadmap items.

Key Qualifications

• 8+ years of DevOps or platform engineering experience, with at least 2 years operating at a Staff or Principal level in an organization of 100+ engineers.
• Deep, hands‑on expertise with Kubernetes — EKS specifically preferred — including troubleshooting workloads, networking, storage, and cluster operations at scale.
• Strong command of Azure DevOps Pipelines, including YAML pipeline authoring, library management, service connections, and environment promotion gates.
• Proven track record designing and maintaining CI/CD systems for microservice architectures with multiple independent teams as consumers.
• Experience operating observability platforms (New Relic, Datadog, or similar) to drive proactive reliability improvements, not just reactive alerting.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or Go) and Infrastructure-as-Code tooling (Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK).
• Familiarity with feature flag patterns and operational considerations around progressive delivery (Unleash or equivalent is a plus).
• Excellent written communication skills — you default to documentation and can translate complex infrastructure decisions into guidance engineers actually read.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with data engineering or ML infrastructure workloads on Kubernetes (Spark on EKS, Argo Workflows, Airflow).
• Background contributing to or maintaining internal developer portals (Backstage or similar).
• Familiarity with FinOps practices and tooling for AWS cost attribution and optimization across shared Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience in SRE-adjacent roles; comfort with SLO/SLI definition and error budget policy.

Special Work Conditions

Sedentary – Involves sitting most of the time but may involve walking or standing for brief periods of time. Some positions may entail exerting up to 15 lbs. of force occasionally and/or a negligible amount of force to lift, carry, push, or pull.

Benefits

When you join Cast & Crew, you’re backed by a benefits package built around what matters most.

• From comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, to a 401(k) match, generous PTO, paid parental leave, health and wellness programs, tuition reimbursement, and employee discounts.
• We’re committed to helping you thrive, professionally, and personally.
• Benefits are subject to eligibility requirements.

Cast & Crew is an equal opportunity employer committed to hiring a diverse workforce and sustaining an inclusive culture. It is our policy to provide equal employment opportunities to all individuals based on job-related qualifications and ability to perform a job, without regard to age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, creed, national origin, disability, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship or marital status, and to maintain a non-discriminatory environment free from intimidation, harassment or bias based upon these grounds.

CA residents Your personal information may be collected in connection with certain services provided by Cast & Crew or its affiliated companies. A summary of your California privacy rights can be found at: https://www.castandcrew.com/privacy-policy/

Compensation is commensurate with various factors including, but not limited to, relevant experience, qualifications, skills, training, licensure, certifications, geographic cost of labor, and other business and organizational needs. Compensation range for candidates in other locations may differ based on the cost of labor in that location. The compensation range for this position is: $190,000.00 - $235,000.00 per year.

TCS

TCS is the creative services division of Cast & Crew, a family of individually innovative companies modernizing the ways in which content is created. TCS' mission is to empower creative talent and streamline the content creation process for projects in film, television, commercials/branded content, social media, theater, music video, video games, and more. We provide solutions that manage the entire project lifecycle, including talent discovery and staffing, production, post production, and distribution. Our brands include Backstage, Coverfly, FilmFreeway, Final Draft, ShareGrid, and Voice123.