Staff Engineer - DevOps

Hard Rock Digital; United States; Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay & benefits

Hybrid/remote work environment

Flexible vacation

Job summary

Hard Rock Digital is seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to lead the internal developer platform strategy on Backstage, driving architecture, adoption, and multi-quarter initiatives. You will partner with DevOps, SRE, security, and product teams to set standards and measure platform health at scale.

The role emphasizes AI-enabled engineering, self-service patterns, and secure, compliant platforms across a global, regulated environment. Excellent leadership and cloud-native expertise are required.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in DevOps or Platform Engineering or SRE with senior leadership experience.
• Architecture ownership for internal developer platform at scale (Backstage preferred).
• Experience driving self-service workflows and golden paths across multiple teams.
• Expert-level AWS cloud knowledge and multi-account design.
• Deep Kubernetes/Docker/Helm experience for platform-level abstractions.
• Strong IaC with Terraform/Terragrunt and modular ecosystems.

Responsibilities

• Define vision and roadmap for an internal developer platform (Backstage).
• Set standards for golden paths, self-service workflows, and paved roads.
• Weigh build-vs-buy and evaluate platform tooling across teams.
• Partner with product, SRE, security, and data to align roadmaps.
• Define and report DevEx metrics and platform health.
• Drive migration of legacy infra onto self-service Backstage patterns.
• Architect multi-account AWS/EKS/Kubernetes platform primitives.
• Champion security, guardrails, and compliance by default.

Skills

DevOps

Platform Engineering

SRE

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

IaC

CI/CD

Security

AI tooling

Tools

Backstage

Docker

Helm

GitHub Actions

ArgoCD

TeamCity

Job description

What are we building?

Hard Rock Digital is a team focused on becoming the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We’re building a team that resonates passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We care about each customer interaction, experience, behavior, and insight and strive to ensure we’re always acting authentically.

Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We’re taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space - ready to join us?

What’s the position?

We are looking for a Staff DevOps Engineer to help set the technical direction for our internal developer platform at Hard Rock Digital. This is a senior technical leadership role: you’ll help own the long-term architecture and roadmap for our internal developer platform, built on Backstage, and drive its adoption across every team in our organization.

Where our Senior Platform Engineers build the golden paths and self-service capabilities, you’ll define which capabilities matter most, how the platform should evolve, and how we measure success—turning platform engineering from a set of useful tools into a strategic lever for the whole company’s engineering velocity. You’ll work with DevOps, SRE, security, and product engineering teams to build consensus on standards and drive multi-quarter initiatives.

You’ll also set the bar for what AI-enabled engineering looks like at Hard Rock Digital: fluently using AI coding assistants, agentic tooling, and LLM-powered workflows yourself, and championing their adoption—including embedding AI-assisted workflows directly into the platform (e.g. AI-assisted scaffolding, incident triage, or documentation generation via Backstage) so every engineer benefits.

What will you do?

As a Staff DevOps Engineer, Platform Engineering, you will:

• Contribute to the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for our internal developer platform (Backstage), including catalog strategy, plugin architecture, and platform APIs.


• Set company-wide standards for golden paths, self-service workflows, and "paved road" patterns spanning infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD, environments, and observability.


• Make build-vs-buy and platform-investment decisions, evaluating Backstage plugins, third-party IDP tooling, and custom development against engineering-wide impact and cost.


• Partner with engineering leadership across product, SRE, security, and data teams to align the platform roadmap with company-wide priorities and identify the highest-leverage investments.


• Define and report on platform health and developer experience (DevEx) metrics—DORA metrics, self-service adoption rates, lead time to production, ticket deflection—and use them to prioritize the roadmap.


• Drive adoption of the platform across teams, including migration strategies for legacy infrastructure and workflows onto self-service, Backstage-based patterns.


• Architect complex, cross-cutting infrastructure and platform capabilities (multi-account AWS, EKS/Kubernetes platform primitives, Terraform/Terragrunt module ecosystems) that other engineers build on top of.


• Champion security, compliance, and guardrail-by-design practices at the platform level, ensuring self-service capabilities are secure and compliant by default across a regulated, global environment.


• Champion and scale AI-enabled engineering practices org-wide—evaluating and rolling out AI coding assistants and agentic tooling, embedding AI-assisted workflows into the platform itself, and helping teams adopt AI-enabled ways of working as a default, not an exception.

What are we looking for?

We’re seeking a seasoned platform engineering leader who has built or scaled an internal developer platform before and understands both the technical depth and the organizational change management required to make self-service actually stick. You should be comfortable operating with significant scope and ambiguity, influencing without direct authority, and translating platform investment into measurable engineering-wide outcomes. Critically, you’re someone who has embraced AI tooling as a genuine force multiplier at both an individual and organizational level—and who can articulate and drive that vision for others.

The ideal candidate will have:

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering, with 3+ years in a senior, staff, or equivalent technical leadership capacity.


• Demonstrated experience owning the architecture and roadmap for an internal developer platform at scale—Backstage strongly preferred—including catalog design, plugin ecosystems, and platform extensibility patterns.


• A track record of driving org-wide adoption of self-service workflows and golden paths, including change management across multiple engineering teams.


• Expert-level knowledge of AWS services and cloud-native architectures (multi-account setups, VPC design, IAM policies, networking) at an organizational scale.


• Deep experience with Kubernetes (EKS preferred), Docker, and Helm, including designing platform-level abstractions on top of container orchestration.


• Advanced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) expertise using Terraform/Terragrunt, with experience designing module ecosystems consumed by many teams via self-service.


• Strong scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, TypeScript/Node.js for Backstage plugin development) and experience architecting extensible platform tooling.


• Experience setting CI/CD strategy and standards across an engineering organization, with tools such as GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, TeamCity, or comparable.


• Strong understanding of observability, DevEx measurement, and how to translate platform investment into metrics leadership cares about (DORA metrics, lead time, adoption rates).


• Deep knowledge of networking, security hardening, and compliance in regulated industries, with experience embedding these as default, automated guardrails at the platform level.


• A track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams or the broader organization.


• AWS Professional Certification (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, or SysOps Administrator) strongly preferred.


• Demonstrated fluency with AI development tools (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) and a point of view on how to responsibly scale AI-enabled engineering practices across an organization, including embedding AI-assisted workflows into internal platforms. The ability to operate at, and drive others toward, AI-enabled development velocity is a core expectation of this role, not a nice-to-have.

What’s in it for you?

We offer our employees more than just competitive compensation. Our team benefits include:

• Competitive pay and benefits


• Flexible vacation allowance


• A hybrid / remote working environment


• Startup culture backed by a secure, global brand

Roster of Uniques

We care deeply about every interaction our customers have with us, and trust and empower our staff to own and drive their experience. Our vision for our business and customers is built on fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where regardless of background or beliefs you feel able to be authentic and bring all your talent into play. We want to celebrate you being you (we are an equal opportunity employer).