Director of DevOps

Position Overview

The Director of DevOps sets the strategy and runs the day-to-day for Exostars global 24x7 production operations. The role is the technical and operational backbone for every customer-impacting issue: it owns the engineering response that Customer Support depends on partners closely with Support on customer outcomes and is the single accountable leader on the engineering side of every Sev-1/Sev-2. This is a highly visible role in a fast-growing fast-moving company every dollar of cloud and tooling spend getsreported upthrough this leader and every step we take toward an AI-native operations posture is driven from this seat.

The successful candidate is an automation-first technologist a cross-organizational operator who is equally credible with engineering product security support and finance and a process-minded leader who treats manual toil as a defect and uses AI as the default tool to eliminate it.

Responsibilities:

Your day if you join us:

24x7 Operations & Customer Issue Response

• Own production uptime performance and reliability across all Exostar SaaS products on a 24x7 basis including SLO definition on-call rotation incident command and stakeholder communications during major incidents.

• Own the engineering and operational response to every customer-impacting issue. Partner with Customer Support on triage root cause communications and resolution Support owns the customer relationship; this role owns the technical fix and the systemic prevention.

• Drive blameless postmortems and ensure every Sev-1/Sev-2 results in a durable engineering or process fix not a well watch for it next time.

• Be the single accountable engineering leader when a customeraskswhat happened and what are you doing about it.

Automation-First Operating Model

• Treat manual operational work as a defect. Set and enforce a target for the percentage of operational toileliminatedeach quarter.

• Drive infrastructure-as-codeGitOps automated remediation and self-healing patterns across the production estate.

• Build a deployment platform that lets engineering teams ship safely andfrequentlywithout DevOps as a bottleneck.

• Own CI/CD pipeline strategy golden paths and the developer experience for shipping to production.

AI-Native Operations

• Stand up and continuously evolve an AIOps practice: AI-driven anomaly detection log summarization intelligent alerting and agentic incident triage.

• Deploy AI agents to draft runbooks post first-pass postmortems and accelerate engineering investigation of customer-reported issues.

• Mine operational and incident data with AI for recurring failure modes and capacity drift and turn those into engineering bets.

Cross-Organizational Leadership

• Operate as a peer to engineering product security customer support and finance leaders. This role lives at the intersection of those functions andhas tobe effective in all of them.

• Partner with Customer Support on the joint operating model: incident handoffs ticket-to-engineering workflows status communications and shared metrics for customer experience during issues.

• Partner with Product Management and Finance on launch-readiness capacity planning and pricing/COGS modeling for new and existing services.

• Partner with the Security Office on compliance audit readiness and secure-by-default infrastructure (SOC 2 NIST 800-171 CMMC FedRAMP-adjacent).

• Represent Operations in customer escalations audit conversations and revenue-impacting deals.

COGS Management & Financial Reporting

• Own the cost-of-goods line for Exostars hosted services. Forecast track andexplain itmonthly to Finance andsenior leadership.

• Drive cloud cost optimization (commitments right-sizing idle elimination architectural efficiency) as an ongoing discipline not an annual project.

• Build the unit-economics views Finance needs to run the business: cost per customer per product per environment.

• Own vendor relationships and contracts for infrastructure observability and managed services; lead RFPs and renewals.

Process & Operational Rigor

• Stand up andmaintainthe operating cadence: weekly ops reviews monthly business reviews quarterly capacity planning incident review boards (jointly with Customer Support and Engineering leadership).

• Define and report KPIs and KRIs the CTO and CFO can use to run the business: availability MTTR deploy frequency COGS per unit automation coverage and engineering-side metrics on customer-impacting issues.

• Maintain the system of record for production inventory dependencies and configuration.

• Own the disaster recovery and business continuity program including the drills not just the plans.

Team Leadership

• Lead coach and grow theDevOps team.

• Build a culture where engineers default toautomationand the whole team takes pride in customer outcomes even when the customer relationship is held by a partner team.

• Hire forautomationinstinct technical depth and cross-functional collaboration. Performance-manage againstan automationand AI-leverage bar not headcount growth.

Qualifications:

You are a great fit for this role if you:

Required

• 10 years running production technical operations for a customer-facing SaaS business with hard uptime SLAs.

• 5 years leading multi-disciplinary teams of 25 across DevOps/SRE and IT.

• Deep hands-on technical depth: cloud (AWS and/or Azure) Kubernetes infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Bicep) CI/CD observability stackssecretsand identity. This is not a role for a manager who lost their technical edge five years ago.

• Demonstrated bias toward automation over headcount with specific examples of toil eliminated deploy frequency increased or incident volume reduced through engineering.

• Track recordof using AI in production: LLM-based assistants agentic workflows AI-driven observability not just experimenting with it.

• Strong financialfluency:built and defended a multi-million-dollar infrastructure budgetownedCOGS partnered with a CFO/Finance organization on unit economics.

• Demonstrated success partnering with Customer Support Customer Success or equivalent functions on joint operating models incident handoffs and shared customer-experience metrics.

• Strong customer-facing presence: composed on a Sev-1 bridge with a CISO and credible in a QBR with a Fortune 100 customer.

• Excellent written and verbal communication. This person writes the postmortem briefs senior leadership and explains the COGS variance clearly.

• Process discipline and detailorientation:reads the runbook audits the dashboard and notices the inconsistency.

• Experienceoperatingin regulated environments SOC 2 NIST 800-171 ITAR CMMC or FedRAMP.
• U.S. Citizens only- Due to customer requirements U.S. Citizenship is required. Ability to gain and maintain Trusted Role is required

Preferred Qualifications:

You are exactly who we are looking for if you:

• Direct experience standingupan AIOps program or deploying AI agents inside a production operations function.

• Experience in defense supplychain aerospace or other regulated industries.

• Familiarity with FedRAMP Moderate CMMC Level 2 and NIST 800-53 / 800-171 Rev 2 control families.

• Experience with PKI HSMs and identity-bound infrastructure.

• Career arc that includes both build (engineering org) and run (operations org) leadership.

Education

• Bachelors degree ina technicaldiscipline.

• Advanced degree preferred.

Exostar - The Company:

Exostars cloud-based platforms create exclusive communities within the Aerospace and Defense Life Sciences and other highly regulated industries where members securely collaborate share information and operate compliantly. Within these communities we build trust. By analyzing community data we provide insights and intelligence enabling organizations to make better timelier decisions to mitigate risk and operate more efficiently.

• We believe in employee development: we promote internally and provide training and educational assistance
• We provide a fun engaged workplace with social and community-building events
• We offer comprehensive benefits and flexible time off plans

Exostar is an Equal Opportunity Employment Employer. The company provides equal employment opportunities to all applicants without regard to race color religion sex national origin age marital status disability status or genetic information. Exostar is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all persons in all facets of employment including recruiting hiring compensation promotion training benefits transfers and working conditions.

Required Experience:

Director