Lead DevOps Engineer

We ship enterprise software for the legal industry. Our customers trust us with confidential litigation material, so how we run our infrastructure is part of the product; at the same time, we need safe lanes to prototype, test, and launch features fast (monthly toward weekly). This role owns the environments and databases our engineers build on and ship through.

This is a player-coach seat, and above all a team-enabler seat: you will lead the environment and platform work directly, set the standard for a small existing team of two engineers with room to grow, and measure your platform by what the engineers and product teams around you ship on it without needing you in the room. Expect roughly 60% of your time hands-on building and operating, and 40% leading, reviewing, and designing.

The three things this role needs in one person:

1. You have owned environments end to end, as code.

You have built and run the full set of environments (e.g. production, staging, QA, development, prototyping and compliance environments) for a product team, and kept them reproducible through infrastructure as code rather than tribal knowledge. Provisioning a new environment is an automated, audit-ready act, not a project.

Evidence looks like: "Rebuilt provisioning on Terraform so a full new non-prod environment stands up in under an hour," or a multi-account cloud setup you designed with automated guardrails. In an interview, you can walk through exactly how prod and staging drift apart at your last job and what you did about it.

2. You have built observability and alerting that other teams actually use.

You have designed and run the monitoring, dashboards, and alerting for production systems, and you built them for the people who own the services, not just for the platform team. Your alerts mean something: each one is actionable, routed to a named owner, and tied to what the business feels when it fires. You have taken a noisy estate and made it quiet enough that a page means act now.

Evidence looks like: "Built the dashboards and runbooks that let application teams diagnose their own incidents instead of paging infrastructure first," or "cut alert volume to a set where every alert has an owner and an action after an alert-fatigue audit." In an interview, you can walk through an alert you deleted and why, and a dashboard a non-infrastructure team uses weekly.

3. You have designed infrastructure solutions that solve technical and business problems.

You build infrastructure that answers to both engineering and the business, not just plumbing. That includes automating compliance reporting so evidence collection is not a manual scramble, and safe ways to stand up and run prototypes. It also includes the security controls a regulated setting demands: least-privilege and break-glass access, and safe read paths (read replicas or sanitized exports) when analysts and business teams need data without needing production.

Evidence looks like: "Automated SOC 2 evidence collection so audit prep dropped from weeks to days," or "stood up a compliant prototyping lane that let product teams ship experiments without a security exception each time." You can walk through a break-glass access process you designed and why you drew the line where you did.

Essential Functions:

• Design, provision, and govern all product environments, including database tiers, with infrastructure as code
• Own and evolve our existing CI/CD pipelines, and design new ones from scratch for green-field projects, across every environment from commit to production; delegate pipeline work as the team grows
• Steward database operations with the team: backup/recovery, availability, capacity, patching (deep DBA specialization is not required; the standard is that the platform's data layer is operated deliberately, not that this person is a DBA)
• Design compliance-reporting automation and access controls (least-privilege, break-glass, safe analyst read paths) at the infrastructure layer, including audit support
• Build observability (today: CloudWatch) that lets service-owning teams troubleshoot their own systems, not just alert this team
• Coordinate releases and environment readiness across internal and external (vendor) development teams
• Set the documentation standard: runbooks and infrastructure docs that are readable by both humans and agents; automate documentation to stay current
• Lead and mentor the engineers doing this work; be the senior escalation point for production incidents. Be comfortable with junior engineers attending standups and coordinating with you asynchronously.
• Partner with application engineers to gather requirements so environment and data constraints are designed in, not discovered late

How you work:

The technical bar is necessary but not sufficient. This role sets the operating standard for the team, so how you show up matters as much as what you can build:

• You are a team enabler first. You measure your platform by what other teams ship on it, and you take real satisfaction in unblocking people.
• You make your work legible. You document the environments you own rather than holding them as knowledge only you carry.
• You have worked in a fast-moving environment and stayed effective when priorities shifted under you.
• You raise solutions alongside your objections. "This won't work" is half an answer; you bring the alternative.
• You design yourself out of being the single point of control. You are comfortable sharing access and supporting break-glass, so the team is never dependent on one person's head.
• You respond to challenging situations constructively, keeping the conversation on the problem rather than the person, stepping away to think when needed.
• You can disagree, and then commit wholeheartedly once a call is made, rather than relitigating it.
• You keep the company's overall objectives in mind when you propose a solution, not just the cleanest technical answer.

Compensation Range & Benefits:

$165,000 – $205,000 annual, commensurate with experience. Benefits include Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage; Life insurance (Voluntary Term and Whole Life); Voluntary Long Term Disability; paid time off and paid holidays; 401(k); Employee Assistance Program (EAP); and Maternity Leave.

• 5+ years in DevOps/SRE/platform roles, including 2+ years leading the work of other engineers
• Deep hands-on experience with AWS, Terraform or equivalent IaC, and CI/CD. We run containers on ECS/Fargate with ECR and observability on CloudWatch today; comparable container-orchestration experience transfers fine.
• Working familiarity with relational database operations (backup/recovery, availability, capacity on SQL Server, Postgres, or managed equivalents). Deep DBA specialization is not required, and data modeling or data-warehouse experience is not needed; schemas are app-owned here.
• Hands-on compliance work (SOC 2 or similar) in a regulated industry
• Legal-industry experience is a plus, not a requirement; regulated-industry judgment is the requirement

EOE M/F/D/V