Lead DevOps Engineer (Application & IT Operations)

Job description

### Why Join Exadel We’re an AI-first global tech company with 25+ years of engineering leadership, 2,000+ team members, and 500+ active projects powering Fortune 500 clients, including HBO, Microsoft, Google, and Starbucks. From AI platforms to digital transformation, we partner with enterprise leaders to build what’s next. What powers it all? Our people are ambitious, collaborative, and constantly evolving. ### About the Client Founded in the Netherlands 180+ years ago, the company operates in over 150 countries. The customer is a global leader in information services for health, tax and accounting, risk and compliance, finance, and legal sectors. ### What You’ll Do - Mentor AppOps engineers, providing technical guidance, conducting code/review for automation scripting, and developing on-call operational excellence. - Own production reliability for critical applications by defining, tracking, and enforcing SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, and capacity/performance baselines. - Lead major incident response and production triage, driving clear business and technical communications, and ensuring data-driven root cause analysis (RCA) with long-term preventative actions. - Direct release, deployment, and change operations by coordinating application deployments, assessing operational risks, enforcing readiness gates, ensuring compliance with client change processes, and validating post-deployment health to improve change success rates. - Architect and maintain operational observability by designing and implementing enterprise dashboards, alert strategies, log/trace pipelines, and runbook automation for rapid system diagnosis and recovery. - Establish and continuously improve operational standards, guardrails, and runbooks, while automating repeatable workflows and repetitive tasks to systematically reduce manual toil and improve operational efficiency. - Partner cross-functionally with Engineering, CloudOps, Security, and Compliance teams to resolve issues, improve service quality, and consult on resiliency patterns (including circuit breakers, bulkheads, graceful degradation, and retries) and performance tuning. - Plan and execute capacity management, scaling strategies, and Disaster Recovery (DR)/Business Continuity Planning (BCP) readiness, including failover testing and simulated scenario exercises. - Champion security-by-default and compliance alignment in operations by enforcing secrets hygiene, patch/vulnerability remediation, certificate/DNS management, least-privilege access, and general security standard adherence. - Drive service reviews with stakeholders, publishing key operational KPIs (such as MTTR, change success rate, and incident rate) to lead continuous improvement roadmaps. - Monitor application health, availability, and performance across all environments, proactively identifying anomalies, resolving application environment issues, and optimizing runtime behavior. - Participate in on-call rotation responsibilities with the Service Delivery and Operations Team. ### What You Bring - Extensive, lead-level experience in DevOps engineering and AppOps, with a focus on operating critical applications in enterprise cloud environments (Azure and/or AWS). - Deep technical knowledge of cloud infrastructure services and components, including networking, load balancers, DNS, SSL/TLS certificates, storage, and messaging services. - Hands-on expertise with enterprise observability stacks (such as Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK/OpenSearch, and OpenTelemetry), alert engineering, and log/metric/trace analysis. - Solid practical understanding of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, multi-environment application lifecycles (Dev, QA, UAT, Prod), and validation strategies in lower/production environments. - Proficiency in deployment strategies (including blue/green, rolling, canary) and traffic management. - Advanced scripting and automation skills using PowerShell, Bash, or Python to develop runbooks, health checks, self-healing, and remediation workflows. - Strong command of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), specifically with Terraform (modules, workspaces), Azure ARM/Bicep, or AWS CloudFormation, including environment drift detection and policy-as-code. - Practical understanding of security and compliance protocols in operations, including secrets and key management, vulnerability remediation, least-privilege access, and audit readiness. - Proven track record of engineering leadership, stakeholder management, technical mentorship, and leading incident response / RCA processes in global, fast-paced environments. - Excellent communication and advisory skills, with the ability to translate technical risks into clear business metrics for stakeholder decision-making. - Strong ownership mindset and the ability to ensure 24x7 application reliability and operational excellence. - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. ### Nice to have - Preferred Certifications: Azure Administrator/Architect, AWS SysOps/DevOps Professional, ITIL Foundation (or higher), SRE Foundation, Terraform Associate/Professional, or other industry-recognized DevOps/SRE credentials. ### English level Advanced ### Legal & Hiring Information - Compensation Transparency: The expected compensation range for this role is $90–100/hr USD, with eligibility for commission, bonus, or other incentive compensation where applicable. Actual compensation will be determined based on experience, skills, qualifications, geographic location within the United States, and business needs. - Location Eligibility: This role is open to candidates residing in the United States. - Experience Requirements: We welcome applicants with relevant experience regardless of where it was obtained. US work experience is not required. - Use of Artificial Intelligence in Hiring: We may use automated tools or artificial intelligence systems to support the screening, assessment, or selection of applicants as part of our hiring process. - Benefits Summary: US-based employees are eligible to participate in Exadel’s benefits programs, which may include comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage; life and disability insurance; retirement savings programs; paid time off; paid holidays; and other wellness or voluntary benefit programs, subject to plan terms and eligibility requirements. - Equal Employment Opportunity: Exadel is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to inclusion across minority, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, and more. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other protected characteristic under applicable federal, state, and local laws. - Accessibility and Accommodation: We are committed to providing accommodations throughout the recruitment process in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and other applicable federal, state, and local accessibility laws. Reasonable accommodations are available to enable individuals with disabilities to perform essential functions. If you require accommodation at any stage of the hiring process, please contact us. - Data Privacy Notice: For applicants residing in California, please note that personal data collected during the application process is subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and will be processed in accordance with our applicant privacy notice. - Disclaimer: Please note: this job description is not exhaustive. Duties and responsibilities may evolve based on business needs. The offer is not binding until a signed contract is in place. ### Exadel Culture We lead with trust, respect, and purpose. We believe in open dialogue, creative freedom, and mentorship that helps you grow, lead, and make a real difference. Ours is a culture where ideas are challenged, voices are heard, and your impact matters.