Job Description
Job Description
ABOUT US
HirexHire (pronounced hire by hire) is a Chicago-based recruiting and talent consultancy that integrates with companies short-term to provide long-term talent solutions. We take a seat in our client’s everyday operations to understand their people goals, gaps, and challenges. We then develop and implement the processes and technologies to execute a sustainable and scalable talent plan.
We partner with companies expecting or experiencing high growth which need to hire at scale or fill a critical role rapidly. Our clients are not looking for quick-fix placements but are thoughtfully building a hiring strategy to scale their businesses.
OUR CLIENT
As this is a confidential search, please contact us for more client information.
THE ROLE
Director, DevOps, you will lead the strategic direction, execution, and continuous evolution of a global DevOps function. This is a hands-on leadership role responsible for building and operating secure, scalable, and highly automated cloud platforms that power critical SaaS products.
You will lead geographically distributed DevOps teams while partnering closely with Engineering, Product, Security, Cloud Operations, and Architecture to ensure high availability, reliability, performance, and delivery velocity. This role also champions the responsible adoption of AI-assisted development and operations tools to improve engineering productivity without compromising security, compliance, or reliability.
This role is hybrid to the Denver, CO area.
WHAT YOU WILL DO
Strategic Leadership & Vision
- Define and execute the global DevOps strategy aligned with business, product, engineering, and security objectives
- Set a clear vision and transparent roadmap for cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, Kubernetes platforms, observability, and developer productivity
- Drive platform modernization through automation, standardization, cloud-native best practices, and AI-enabled workflows
- Balance executive-level leadership with hands-on technical contribution and informed decision-making
Hands-On Technical Leadership
- Actively contribute to architecture design, tooling selection, and complex technical problem-solving
- Lead by example through direct involvement in infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes platforms, and automation
- Leverage AI-assisted engineering tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, Devin, or similar) to accelerate development, troubleshooting, and delivery
- Review designs, code, and infrastructure changes to ensure quality, security, scalability, and operability
- Serve as an escalation point for complex production and platform issues
Global Team Leadership
- Lead, mentor, and scale a globally distributed DevOps organization, including managers and senior engineers
- Build a high-performance, inclusive culture across regions and time zones
- Define clear roles, career paths, and performance expectations
- Align teams around shared goals, empowering employees to deliver measurable outcomes
- Utilize third-party partners and vendors as needed to achieve operational objectives
Platform Reliability & Operational Excellence
- Partner closely with SRE to ensure platform uptime, stability, and effective incident management
- Support incident response, post-incident reviews, and long-term reliability improvements
- Drive capacity planning, resilience engineering, disaster recovery, and infrastructure cost optimization
- Establish and enforce operational standards, runbooks, and documentation
DevOps, Cloud & Automation
- Own and evolve CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, and infrastructure-as-code practices
- Lead Kubernetes platform strategy and operations at scale
- Drive automation across provisioning, testing, deployment, recovery, and operational workflows
- Ensure secure, compliant, auditable infrastructure across all environments (cloud and on-prem where applicable)
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Act as a trusted partner to Engineering, Product, Architecture, Security, and Cloud Operations leadership
- Translate business and product needs into scalable, reliable platform capabilities
- Influence architectural decisions to ensure operability, performance, and cost efficiency
- Clearly communicate risks, tradeoffs, metrics, and performance trends to executive stakeholders
Metrics, Governance & Continuous Improvement
- Define and track KPIs for uptime, deployment velocity, reliability, cost efficiency, and platform health
- Build dashboards and analytics to monitor production performance and operational outcomes
- Drive continuous improvement using data-driven insights
- Evaluate, select, and adopt new tools, vendors, and AI-driven capabilities where appropriate
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
- 10+ years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, or infrastructure roles
- Strong hands-on background as a software developer prior to moving into DevOps or platform leadership
- 5+ years of experience leading large, global, distributed teams (50+ preferred)
- Deep expertise in cloud platforms (AWS and Azure required)
- Proven experience operating Kubernetes at production scale
- Strong experience with CI/CD platforms (e.g., Azure DevOps), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, ARM, etc.), and container ecosystems
- Track record of operating large-scale, mission-critical SaaS platforms
- Experience establishing and managing operational, uptime, and financial metrics
- Demonstrated experience managing OpEx budgets and driving cost optimization
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience in high-growth SaaS or enterprise software environments
- Strong understanding of SRE principles and reliability engineering
- Experience in regulated or security-conscious environments
- Familiarity with on-prem and hybrid infrastructure models
- Experience establishing best practices for safe, secure, and effective enterprise AI adoption