Director of DevOps

📋 Description

• • Lead the strategic vision and execution for Knox Systems' enterprise DevOps, cloud platform, and automation initiatives, ensuring alignment with the company's mission to build and operate secure cloud and AI environments for critical U.S. government missions.
• • Define and own the comprehensive DevOps and Platform Engineering strategy, roadmap, and operating model, setting the direction for how Knox delivers secure, scalable, and compliant cloud solutions.
• • Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing, multi-disciplinary organization comprising DevOps Managers, Platform Engineers, and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement.
• • Establish clear organizational structures, including ownership models, robust career paths, performance standards, and proactive succession planning to ensure sustained team growth and capability.
• • Champion a pervasive DevSecOps culture across the organization, emphasizing automation, unwavering reliability, clear accountability, and a commitment to ongoing learning and refinement of processes and systems.
• • Act as the primary executive escalation point for critical issues related to platform reliability, deployment risks, and overall operational maturity, ensuring swift and effective resolution.
• • Set the architectural direction for Knox's multi-cloud infrastructure, encompassing AWS, Azure, and GCP, with a strong emphasis on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles for consistency and manageability.
• • Define and enforce enterprise-wide standards for essential cloud infrastructure components, including networking, Identity and Access Management (IAM), encryption, and key management, ensuring a secure and unified approach.
• • Establish and maintain configuration baselines and ensure environment consistency across all cloud deployments, minimizing drift and potential security vulnerabilities.
• • Implement and govern Policy-as-Code and GitOps workflows to automate compliance and operational checks, ensuring that infrastructure changes are auditable and adhere to defined policies.
• • Ensure that all platform designs and automation efforts rigorously meet FedRAMP Moderate/High requirements and NIST 800-53 controls, critical for operating in government-regulated environments.
• • Evaluate, recommend, and approve the adoption of new platform tooling and cloud services that enhance security, efficiency, and scalability, staying abreast of industry advancements.
• • Own and drive the enterprise CI/CD strategy, enabling multiple product and engineering teams to deliver software rapidly and reliably.
• • Standardize CI/CD pipelines by developing reusable frameworks, integrating comprehensive security scanning tools, and embedding compliance validation checks directly into the workflow.
• • Empower engineering teams with self-service deployment capabilities, carefully balancing the need for speed and agility with essential governance and security requirements.
• • Define, track, and report on key DevOps metrics, including DORA metrics, deployment success rates, and release reliability KPIs, to measure and improve performance.
• • Collaborate closely with Engineering leadership to identify opportunities and implement strategies that continuously enhance developer productivity and accelerate release cadences.
• • Establish organization-wide standards for observability, SRE practices, and reliability engineering, ensuring systems are designed for resilience and performance.
• • Ensure all critical systems are thoroughly instrumented with metrics, logs, and traces, aligned with defined Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to provide deep visibility.
• • Partner with Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security teams to enhance detection capabilities, refine alerting mechanisms, and strengthen incident response processes.
• • Lead comprehensive post-incident reviews, identifying root causes and driving systemic improvements through automation, architectural changes, and process enhancements.
• • Collaborate proactively with Security and Compliance leadership to embed compliance-as-code principles across all platforms and CI/CD pipelines, automating evidence collection and control validation.
• • Own and manage the DevOps and platform engineering responsibilities for critical compliance functions, including Continuous Monitoring (ConMon), evidence automation for audits, and secure secrets, identity, and access management.
• • Ensure all platform documentation, runbooks, and operational policies meet the stringent requirements of FedRAMP and Third-Party Assessment Organizations (3PAOs).
• • Serve as a key technical leader and subject matter expert during audits and compliance reviews, providing necessary information and demonstrating adherence to controls.
• • Establish and mature FinOps practices across all cloud environments, integrating cost controls and optimization strategies directly into automation and platform design.
• • Ensure consistent and accurate tagging, usage tracking, and cost attribution for all cloud resources to enable effective financial governance.
• • Provide executive-level reporting on cloud spend, identify optimization opportunities, and demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of cloud infrastructure.
• • Balance the critical requirements of performance, reliability, and cost efficiency in all platform-related decisions and strategic planning.
• • Act as the primary Platform/DevOps representative in key cross-functional forums, including architecture review boards, change management processes, and release readiness assessments.
• • Communicate platform health, identified risks, and ongoing progress effectively to senior leadership, ensuring transparency and informed decision-making.
• • Partner with leaders across Product, Engineering, Security, and Operations to align priorities, foster collaboration, and ensure cohesive execution of strategic initiatives.
• • Leverage extensive experience with cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, utilizing IaC tools like Terraform and Ansible, and containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
• • Drive the adoption and standardization of CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and Azure DevOps, alongside GitOps workflows using ArgoCD or Flux.
• • Implement and manage observability solutions including Grafana, Datadog, and cloud-native monitoring tools, ensuring comprehensive system visibility.
• • Oversee the secure management of secrets and identities using tools like HashiCorp Vault and cloud provider-specific services.
• • Ensure all platform activities and configurations align with compliance frameworks such as FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, SOC 2, and ISO 27001.