Lead Associate Principal, Software Engineering: DevOps

The OCC • Chicago, IL

4d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) is seeking a Lead Associate Principal, Software Engineering: DevOps to join their team. This role involves collaborating with various product, infrastructure, operations, security, and production control teams to fulfill technical requirements. The successful candidate will drive site reliability, system observability, and operational excellence across the platform. This is a key role in ensuring the stability and efficiency of OCC's systems.

Requirements

• Understanding of Kanban and/or Agile methodologies
• Familiarity with SRE principles as defined by Google SRE practices (error budgets, toil elimination, reliability hierarchy)
• Able to succeed in a fast-paced environment with frequent changes
• Comfortable communicating with both technical and non-technical audiences
• Self-starter — takes initiative to research, learn, and deliver; anticipates the play
• Team player — humble, collaborative, and focused on making the entire team succeed
• AWS EC2, Kubernetes, Kafka, Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, Hashicorp Vault
• Observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or equivalent
• Incident management platforms and on-call tooling (e.g., PagerDuty, OpsGenie)
• Microservices and streaming data-intensive application architecture
• Application architecture, networking, and security in the cloud
• Setting up platforms in AWS for high-performance requirements
• Broad experience in API-based development
• Git and Artifactory for sourcing artifacts
• Multi-AZ, multi-region failover architecture
• Chaos engineering principles and tooling (e.g., Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, LitmusChaos)
• Fluent with different data formats and structures: JSON, Protobuf, Avro
• SQL and NoSQL databases, in-memory data stores
• Java/Python/Scala/Golang software development
• Two or more of the following: web/mobile application development, Unix/Linux environments, event-driven systems, transaction processing systems, distributed and parallel systems, large software system development, security software development, public-cloud platforms
• Fluent in industry best practices, software patterns, and architecture principles
• Enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF
• Ability to define and document architecture strategies, designs, and requirements across all enterprise architecture domains
• Ability to define service-based, component architectures and demonstrate visualization of enterprise architecture concepts
• BS degree in Computer Science, similar technical field, or equivalent experience
• 7+ years of experience building large-scale, data-centric solutions
• 7+ years of recent experience participating on a DevOps or SRE team, or as product owner for such a team

Nice To Haves

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect / DevOps Engineer
• Kubernetes, Kafka certification
• Google Cloud Professional — Site Reliability Engineer or equivalent SRE-focused certification
• Project/program management certifications

Responsibilities

• Guides the implementation using CI/CD pipelines in Kubernetes environment
• Directs review, configuration, and execution of Terraform and Ansible automation pipelines delivered by product teams
• Guides the setup of common infrastructure platforms like multi-region Kubernetes and Kafka clusters
• Elicits requirements for application deployment and sizing to manage expected workloads
• Defines and enforces Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error Budgets in collaboration with product teams
• Leads blameless post-mortems and drives resolution of action items to reduce repeat incidents
• Designs and implements observability frameworks covering metrics, logs, and distributed tracing across all platform services
• Drives toil reduction initiatives by identifying and automating repetitive operational work
• Partners with product teams to embed reliability requirements and non-functional requirements (NFRs) early in the software development lifecycle
• Monitors application performance and tunes systems working with product teams
• Confers with product team leads and practitioners to create deployment and reliability plans
• Confers with Enterprise Architecture and Renaissance architecture teams to devise implementation architecture
• Promotes standards across application configuration towards the highest security posture
• Collaborates with access management and security teams on setting up roles and permissions using least privilege strategies
• Collaborates with integration/performance testing teams to leverage integrated release testing in the Release Acceptance environment
• Collaborates with production controls teams on monitoring, failover, logging, and alerting strategies
• Owns and continuously improves incident response runbooks, on-call rotations, and escalation procedures
• Conducts capacity planning and load forecasting to proactively address scalability needs
• Implements and validates infrastructure failover scenarios
• Confers with Network team on all connectivity plans and issue resolution (including between on-premises and AWS)
• Follows and enables program-level agile practices for efficient collaboration and delivery
• Develops documentation for ORT technical infrastructure, architecture, and reliability support

Benefits

• A hybrid work environment, up to 2 days per week of remote work
• Tuition Reimbursement to support your continued education
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance
• Technology Stipend allowing you to use the device of your choice to connect to our network while working remotely
• Generous PTO and Parental leave
• 401k Employer Match
• Competitive health benefits including medical, dental and vision

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree