Director of DevOps

Find•Herndon, VA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

The Director of DevOps sets the strategy and runs the day-to-day for Exostar’s 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 gets reported up through 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.

Requirements

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 stacks, secrets and identity.
Demonstrated bias toward automation over headcount — with specific examples of toil eliminated, deploy frequency increased, or incident volume reduced through engineering.
Track record of using AI in production: LLM-based assistants, agentic workflows, AI-driven observability — not just experimenting with it.
Strong financial fluency: built and defended a multi-million-dollar infrastructure budget, owned COGS, 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 detail orientation: reads the runbook, audits the dashboard, and notices the inconsistency.
Experience operating in 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

Nice To Haves

Direct experience standing up an AIOps program or deploying AI agents inside a production operations function.
Experience in defense supply chain, 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.
Bachelor’s degree in a technical discipline.
Advanced degree preferred.

Responsibilities

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 “we’ll watch for it next time.”
Be the single accountable engineering leader when a customer asks “what happened, and what are you doing about it.”
Treat manual operational work as a defect. Set and enforce a target for the percentage of operational toil eliminated each quarter.
Drive infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, automated remediation, and self-healing patterns across the production estate.
Build a deployment platform that lets engineering teams ship safely and frequently without DevOps as a bottleneck.
Own CI/CD pipeline strategy, golden paths, and the developer experience for shipping to production.
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.
Operate as a peer to engineering, product, security, customer support, and finance leaders. This role lives at the intersection of those functions and has to be 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.
Own the cost-of-goods line for Exostar’s hosted services. Forecast, track, and explain it monthly to Finance and senior 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.
Stand up and maintain the 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.
Lead, coach, and grow the DevOps team. Build a culture where engineers default to automation and the whole team takes pride in customer outcomes — even when the customer relationship is held by a partner team.
Hire for automation instinct, technical depth, and cross-functional collaboration.
Performance-manage against an automation and AI-leverage bar, not headcount growth.