Director, DevOps

Position Overview

The Director, DevOps is a hands-on technology leader accountable for the strategy and the day-to-day execution of CI/CD, release engineering, and site reliability across our mobility business. The DevOps function operates in a hybrid environment that includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and on-premises data centers, in close partnership with the Cloud Engineering organization.

This is a working leadership role, not a layered management role. The Director leads a team of senior DevOps and SRE engineers directly — setting direction, designing the hardest pieces, writing and reviewing code, owning incidents, and shipping alongside the team. The right leader is energized by being close to the work, comfortable in a terminal and in front of executives in the same day, and uses that proximity to make better decisions faster.

You will own the build, release, and runtime reliability layers supporting a multitude of microservices and applications across the Verra Mobility portfolio. You will partner with peers in Cloud Engineering, Software Engineering, Architecture, Product, and Information Security, and you will be accountable for the reliability, security posture, and delivery velocity of the software your teams ship.

Key Responsibilities

Hands-On Technical Leadership

• Lead from the front: design and contribute directly to pipelines, release automation, deployment tooling, and observability instrumentation. Pick up the hard problems alongside the team.
• Own the technical direction for CI/CD, release engineering, and SRE practices across AWS, Azure, and on-prem workloads. Make architectural decisions for the delivery pipeline that span environments and product lines.
• Personally review designs, pull requests, and significant pipeline or automation changes; raise the technical bar through high-signal feedback and pairing.
• Set engineering standards — pipeline-as-code patterns, branching strategies, deployment patterns (blue/green, canary, feature flags), observability instrumentation — and ensure they are adopted in practice, not just documented.

Team Leadership & Direct Management

• Directly manage a team of senior DevOps engineers and SREs, including hiring, performance management, growth, and compensation.
• Build a small, senior, high-trust team where leadership is shared and engineers operate with autonomy and clear ownership.
• Establish a culture of operational excellence, blameless learning, written communication, and disciplined engineering practice.
• Manage the on-call rotation as a participant when needed, not as an observer. Hold the team to a sustainable paging volume and meaningful post-incident follow-through.

CI/CD & Release Engineering

• Own the end-to-end CI/CD platform supporting hundreds of microservices and applications, including pipeline-as-code standards, build artifacts, container images, and deployment automation across Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.
• Drive measurable, sustained improvement in DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service.
• Standardize branching strategies, release patterns, rollback procedures, and pre-production validation gates across the portfolio.
• Partner with QE to embed automated testing — unit, integration, contract, performance, and security — into pipelines so that quality is enforced before production.

Reliability & Incident Management

• Own the availability and performance of the production software the team is responsible for releasing. Define and maintain SLOs and error budgets for top-tier services, and hold both DevOps and product engineering accountable to them.
• Serve as incident commander for high-severity production events. Drive the root-cause analysis personally on the most significant incidents and ensure corrective actions ship.
• Own the observability practice for delivery: metrics, logs, traces, and synthetic monitoring that make production behavior visible to the teams that need it.
• Champion chaos engineering, game days, and disaster recovery testing in coordination with Cloud Engineering to validate resilience of hybrid systems.

Security & Compliance

• Partner with Information Security to embed shift-left security into every pipeline: SAST, DAST, SCA, container and IaC scanning, secrets management, signed artifacts, and supply-chain controls.
• Manage secrets, certificates, and pipeline identity in coordination with Cloud Engineering and Information Security (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault etc.).
• Ensure pipeline and release controls satisfy compliance requirements relevant to mobility, payments, and government work (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, NIST, and similar); own engineering evidence for external audits.

Strategy & Roadmap

• Own a 12–18 month roadmap for DevOps and SRE that balances reliability, security, developer experience, and delivery velocity; communicate trade-offs clearly to …