Lead DevOps Engineer

Updater

51d

About The Position

Join Updater’s Platform Engineering team as a Lead DevOps Engineer who combines technical excellence and exceptional collaboration skills to deliver impact. You will drive vital initiatives including deployment velocity, observability, system reliability, and developer experience. You'll build the infrastructure and tooling that lets engineers ship faster and sleep better—think GitOps workflows, Kubernetes configuration and optimization, comprehensive Datadog observability coverage, and the kind of automation that makes deployments uneventful. This is platform engineering done right: pragmatic, impactful, and centered on enabling the broader engineering organization.

Requirements

Excellent cross-functional collaboration abilities—your work spans the entire engineering organization, requiring you to build and utilize relationships and champion DevEx improvements across teams
Ability to communicate effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences alike, and leverages visuals, data, and concise documentation to build shared understanding
Deep empathy for DevEx—you genuinely understand engineer pain points, involve users in design decisions, and measure success by how much you improve their daily work
Positive, team-oriented mindset that treats every day as an opportunity to improve and inspire others through your can-do attitude
Previous experience on a platform engineering team where you led complex infrastructure or tooling migration efforts and built useful dev-focused tools
Deep practical experience architecting and implementing solutions in AWS, backed by strong command of cloud design patterns and technologies
Deep expertise in Kubernetes containerized workloads and orchestration
Strong command of observability tools like DataDog or Prometheus
Proficiency in Terraform IaC
Experience in building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and associated best practices
Solid experience with Git via Gitlab, Github, or Bitbucket.
Familiarity with GitOps tooling like Spacelift or Flux
Strong project management skills that balance interrupt-driven and roadmap work
Eagerness to learn new and evolving technologies in the Platform Engineering ecosystem

Nice To Haves

Frontend or backend development skills
Previous experience as project lead or team lead
Use of AI tooling to help improve efficiency in your daily work
Previous experience tuning SQL and caching technologies

Responsibilities

Embody a culture of continuous improvement and shared ownership backed by clear documentation, runbooks, and other shift left contributions
Build strong, collaborative relationships evidenced by proactive engagement from product teams
Continually improve system reliability and observability coverage
Reduce tooling and config complexity so that engineers spend less time fighting tools and more time building features
Optimize Infrastructure costs without compromising reliability
Reduce time-to-production for new features and services
Ensure reliable, repeatable, and better standardized deployments with minimal manual intervention