Director, DevOps

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Own a 1218 month roadmap for DevOps and SRE that balances reliability security developer experience and delivery velocity; communicate trade-offs clearly to product and engineering leadership.
• Instrument and act on developer experience signals: time to first deploy for a new service build and deploy times friction surveys and toil reduction.
• Drive modernization of legacy build release and deployment patterns; retire or consolidate redundant tooling rather than letting it accumulate.
• Translate DevOps investment into outcomes that executive leadership can act on DORA improvements SLO attainment and concrete examples of developer-experience gains.

• Partner closely with the Cloud Engineering leader as a peer; align on the boundary between cloud infrastructure (their domain) and the delivery pipeline and runtime reliability (this roles domain) and present a coordinated story to engineering and product leadership.
• Partner with Software Engineering to ensure new services are built with pipeline observability and release templates from day one not bolted on later.
• Partner with Architecture to align DevOps direction with the broader technology roadmap including migrations between legacy and modern platforms.
• Translate platform reality into clear narratives for the CTO CIO and executive committee including risk investment trade-offs and roadmap progress.
• Engage with sales customer success and key customers when delivery reliability security or roadmap intersects with customer commitments.

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering or related field or equivalent professional experience.
• 10 years of progressive engineering experience in DevOps SRE or Release Engineering including 4 years in a leadership role directly managing senior engineers.
• Deep current hands-on experience you should be able to walk into a terminal open a PR and ship today. Recent leadership roles must include direct technical contribution not just oversight.
• Demonstrated experience operating delivery pipelines and production systems at scale across AWS Azure and on-premises environments with a clear understanding of the operational and security trade-offs between them.
• Deep expertise in CI/CD platforms specifically Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions (experience with Jenkins or GitLab CI a plus) including pipeline-as-code authoring reusable templates and self-hosted runner management.
• Strong working knowledge of container build registry and deployment workflows (Docker ACR ECR Harbor) and Kubernetes-based deployments (EKS AKS or self-managed).
• Working knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code (Cloud Formation Templates Terraform etc.) sufficient to collaborate effectively with Cloud Engineering on shared concerns such as deployment targets networking for pipelines and identity.
• Strong scripting and programming skills in two or more of: Python Go Bash PowerShell or TypeScript/JavaScript. Comfortable reading and modifying code in any language the team encounters.
• Experience implementing observability tooling such as Datadog New Relic Splunk Prometheus Grafana ELK or Azure Monitor / CloudWatch.
• Track record of leading production incident response personally and driving measurable improvements to MTTR change failure rate and SLO attainment.
• Experience supporting compliance regimes such as SOC 2 PCI-DSS ISO 27001 or FedRAMP including engineering evidence for external audits.
• Clear concise written communication. Comfortable engaging with the CTO executive committee and external customers and equally comfortable in a design review or an incident bridge.
• Successful completion of the Nlets fingerprinting background assessment.
• Must comfortable with commute into office 3 days a week.

• Experience in mobility transportation tolling parking fleet or other high-volume transaction-processing or IoT-adjacent industries.
• Experience leading large-scale CI/CD consolidation or modernization (e.g. Jenkins-to-GitHub Actions monolithic-pipeline to pipeline-as-code).
• Experience operating in environments with both modern microservices and legacy applications under a unified delivery practice.
• Familiarity with progressive delivery tooling (Argo CD Flux Spinnaker LaunchDarkly Unleash) and GitOps patterns.
• Active participation in the broader engineering community: writing conference speaking open-source contribution or industry advisory roles.

• Within 90 days: a current-state assessment of CI/CD release observability and on-call practices across AWS Azure and on-prem with a prioritized roadmap named owners and a clear point of view on what to keep change and retire.
• Within 6 months: visible technical contribution from the Director on the hardest delivery problems; standardized pipeline patterns adopted by the majority of service teams; documented SLOs for top-tier services and a mature incident response process.
• Within 12 months: sustained improvement in DORA metrics and SLO attainment; demonstrable reduction in MTTR; a small senior engaged team with clear ownership and growth paths; a healthy partnership with Cloud Engineering and a clear shared model of responsibilities.

This position is not eligible for sponsorship now or in the feature.