Head of DevOps

Job description

**At Semperis, our mission is to be a Force for Good. Starting with being a great place to work.** We believe that when people feel valued, supported, and empowered, they do their best work. That’s why we focus on creating an employee experience rooted in purpose, growth, and balance. Semperis has been recognized as one of America’s Fastest-Growing Cybersecurity Companies by the Inc. 5000, a DUNS 100 Top Startup to Work For, and a multi-year Inc. Best Workplace awardee. **Head of DevOps** We're seeking a **Head of DevOps** to lead our DevOps function, managing a mix of team leads and individual contributors across a global organization. This is a senior leadership role for someone who sets technical strategy and organizational direction, while remaining sharp enough technically to dive into a hard problem, challenge an architecture decision, or mentor an engineer through a tough debugging session when it counts. You'll own the DevOps roadmap and org structure, and be the escalation point for both people challenges and the toughest technical ones. **What You Will Be Doing** **Organizational Leadership** - Manage a team of managers and senior ICs, setting the org structure and growth plan for the DevOps function as it scales - Own hiring, performance management, and career development for both direct reports and, through them, the broader team - Coach team leads on how to manage their own people and technical decisions, rather than managing every engineer directly - Decide when to delegate ownership to a lead versus when to step in personally **Strategy & Technical Direction** - Own the DevOps roadmap, translating business and product priorities into infrastructure and delivery capabilities - Set technical direction for cloud architecture, CI/CD, and platform reliability across Azure, Kubernetes (AKS), Istio, and GitOps workflows - Make tooling, budget, and build-vs-buy decisions for the function - Define KPIs, SLAs, and error budgets that connect infrastructure performance to business outcomes **Deep Technical Involvement** - Get personally involved in the hardest technical challenges — critical incidents, contentious architecture decisions, persistent systemic issues — where your experience changes the outcome - Review code, infrastructure, and architecture decisions at a level of detail that gives real feedback, not rubber-stamp approval - Lead root-cause analysis on major incidents and drive long-term fixes - Mentor senior engineers and team leads directly on technical problem-solving, not just process **Leading Change** - Identify friction in current workflows and lead the initiatives to resolve it, from diagnosis through adoption - Drive adoption of practices like GitOps maturity, Zero Trust, and observability standards across the org - Build change management capability into your leads so improvements scale without your constant involvement **Cross-Functional Collaboration** - Serve as the primary bridge between DevOps and Engineering, Security, IT, and Product leadership - Partner with Security and Compliance on Zero Trust, PIM/RBAC, and WAF strategy and implementation - Represent DevOps in executive and cross-functional planning, backed by real technical credibility - Broker tradeoffs between teams with competing priorities **Required Qualifications** - 8+ years of DevOps/SRE experience in SaaS or cloud-native environments - 4+ years in a senior leadership role, including direct experience managing managers or team leads, not just ICs - Strong hands-on background with Terraform/Terragrunt, Kubernetes (AKS), Helm, and Istio, with enough depth to review and challenge technical decisions directly - Track record of leading organizational change initiatives from strategic framing through execution - Proven ability to mentor senior engineers and develop other managers - Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, particularly with Security and Product leadership - Experience with Zero Trust architecture, PIM/RBAC, and secure network configuration in Azure **Preferred Qualifications** - Experience scaling a DevOps or platform function through a management layer (i.e., building out team leads under you) - Experience with Kafka, event-driven systems, and distributed systems architecture - Background in identity, security, or compliance-heavy SaaS products - Experience presenting technical strategy to executive audiences - History of building internal platforms or tools adopted by other engineering teams **Why Join Semperis?** You’ll be part of a global team on the front lines of cybersecurity innovation. At Semperis, we celebrate curiosity, integrity, and people who take initiative. If you’re someone who sees the glass as half full, embraces challenges as growth opportunities, and values a healthy balance between work and life—we’d love to meet you. \*\*Semperis maintains office locations in several cities across the globe. Where the job description specifies a required location, candidates will follow our hybrid work model. This includes working up to three days per week and remotely the remaining days. ### Semperis is an equal opportunity employer and will not discriminate against an applicant or employee based on race, color, religion, creed, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, sex (including gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), age, physical or mental disability, veteran or military status, genetic information, citizenship, marital status, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law. The information collected by the Semperis application is solely to determine suitability for employment, verify identity, and maintain employment statistics. ### ### Applicants with disabilities may be entitled to reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act and/or other applicable state or local laws. A reasonable accommodation is a change in the way things are normally done which will ensure an equal employment opportunity without imposing undue hardship on Semperis. Please inform Semperis representative Anna Taylor, Director of Global Recruiting, if you need assistance completing this application or to otherwise participate in the application process.