Lead DevOps Engineer

THIS ROLE IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR C2C, VISA SPONSORSHIP, or THIRD PARTY
We are currently having a need for a contract to hire Lead DevOps Engineer. This is a hybrid opportunity requiring 3 days a week on site in the Dublin, OH area.
The Lead DevOps Engineer owns the clarity, reliability, security, and repeatability of how systems are built, deployed, and operated. This role designs and maintains automated, scalable, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure across production, development, and test environments.
This is a deeply hands-on position responsible for executing and improving deployments, observability, and core operational practices to reduce risk caused by opaque processes, undocumented knowledge, and single points of failure. The Lead DevOps Engineer transforms deployment and infrastructure from siloed knowledge into understandable, well-documented, and observable systems that engineers can confidently use and improve.
This role leads through practice—mentoring engineers, establishing standards, improving processes, and removing operational obstacles. Working independently and in close partnership with Engineering, the DevOps Lead reduces operational burden, increases delivery confidence, and builds platforms that scale reliably. This position provides technical leadership through ownership and execution but does not include formal people-management responsibilities.Position Responsibilities
Platform, Deployment, and Operations Ownership

• Own and execute deployment processes end-to-end, ensuring they are secure, repeatable, transparent, and well documented with clear failure signals and automated rollback strategies.
• Design, build, and maintain automated, scalable, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure across production, development, and test environments.
• Build, operate, and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines with clear failure signals, recovery paths, and rollback strategies.
• Own application-level networking and infrastructure concerns, including network configuration, access controls, and connectivity required to support development and production environments.
• Own all infrastructure and networking concerns, including configuration and troubleshooting of site-to-site VPNs, firewall rules, and secure connectivity required for integrations and remote access.
• Oversee day-to-day DevOps operations, including infrastructure health, monitoring, logging, patching, security posture, and maintenance. Ensure systems are observable and failures are diagnosable through strong metrics, logging, root-cause visibility, and effective incident response.

Security, Reliability, and Standards

• Perform regular access analysis across all systems, managing secrets, credentials, and IAM roles to ensure adherence to security best practices.
• Proactively support compliance requirements (e.g., SOC 2) by maintaining auditable operational practices and generating technical evidence/reports for software and security audits.
• Enforce a proactive security posture through patching, encryption, and vulnerability management across web servers, load balancers, and data stores.

Enablement, Leadership, and Continuous Improvement

• Partner with software engineers during deployments and operational work to build shared understanding and enable safe, independent troubleshooting.
• Deploy, manage, and scale web and application servers, load balancers, queues, and caches through automated, repeatable workflows.
• Identify, prioritize, and deliver improvements that reduce operational risk, remove bottlenecks, improve efficiency, and increase delivery confidence.
• Document systems and processes with a focus on explaining both how they work and why.
• Take proactive ownership of workload while maintaining strong coordination and transparency across the team.
• Perform other job-related duties as assigned to support departmental goals and continuous improvement initiatives.

Required Skills

• Strong ability to understand systems end-to-end, including application architecture, infrastructure, and deployment workflows.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex issues across infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and runtime environments.
• Solid understanding of observability, including metrics, logging, alerting, and root-cause analysis.
• Strong security mindset, including secrets management, access controls, encryption, patching, and vulnerability management.
• Deep understanding of network topology, including the ability to configure and troubleshoot site-to-site VPNs, firewall rules, and hybrid-cloud connectivity.
• Hands-on approach combined with strategic thinking and sound technical judgment.
• Ability to confidently assess situations and articulate clear recommendations (“what we should do and why”).
• Strong ownership mindset with the ability to prioritize work that reduces risk, improves reliability, and drives continuous improvement.
• Effective collaboration skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to lead through influence by pairing, mentoring, documenting, and establishing practical standards.
• Comfort operating in environments where structure must be built, not inherited, with a focus on clarity and pragmatic solutions.

Education and Experience

• 6–10 years of hands-on experience in DevOps, infrastructure, or platform engineering supporting production systems.
• Advanced programming experience (Python, Go, Ruby, etc.).
• Proficiency with Linux/Unix administration, scripting, and programming (bash, Python, Ruby, etc.).
• Deep hands-on expertise with core DevOps technologies such as Docker, Terraform, Ansible, and CloudFormation.
• Strong experience designing and improving CI/CD workflows for provisioning, deployment, and scaling.
• Hands-on experience managing application-level networking, VPN configurations, load balancers, and secure connectivity for distributed environments.
• Experience implementing test automation and using AI-assisted tooling to improve deployment quality and operational efficiency.
• Strong troubleshooting and monitoring skills for Linux operating systems.
• Experience deploying and managing web/application servers, load balancers, queues, and caches; proven ability to scale and build resiliency into web architectures.
• Proficiency with source control systems and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) for creating scriptable, repeatable processes.
• Must be authorized to work in the U.S.

Nice to Have

• Experience with AWS (EC2, S3, Route 53, VPC, IAM, EKS).
• Database administration experience.
• Experience supporting or deploying 12-Factor applications.