Manager, Software Engineering DevOps

OCC • Chicago, IL

2d • $140,800 - $232,500 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Manager, Environment Operations (EnvOps) will lead and optimize the L1 and L2 support functions responsible for full production-level environment support across application deployments, middleware, and platform infrastructure. This role drives incident response quality, implements SLA governance, leads alert reduction and MTTR improvement initiatives, and delivers actionable operational metrics to leadership. The Manager ensures the team operates at a high standard of readiness — triaging, resolving, and escalating environment issues with speed, accuracy, and full documentation discipline.

Requirements

• Proven team leadership experience — taking initiative, driving follow-through, and holding a team accountable to defined standards across varying incident types and urgencies.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a strong team player — working across L1, L2, Platform, Security, and App Dev teams on both long-running improvement programs and rapid incident response under tight deadlines.
• Deep experience in production environment supports hands-on knowledge of application deployment pipelines, container orchestration, messaging platforms, and middleware infrastructure.
• Ability to create, tune, and maintain monitoring alerts and operational runbooks independently.
• Effective and excellent oral and written communication skills — able to translate technical incident detail into clear, concise leadership reporting without loss of accuracy.
• Strong analytical, judgement, and consultation skills — able to triage ambiguous situations, make sound decisions under pressure, and consult effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to work independently and manage multiple parallel priorities with strong organizational discipline.
• Deployment & Pipeline tooling: Harness (continuous delivery pipelines, deployment verification, rollback automation), Jenkins (CI/CD pipeline management, job configuration, build troubleshooting), GitHub (branching strategies, pull request workflows, pipeline integration).
• Container & orchestration platforms: Kubernetes (k8s) pod lifecycle management, namespace operations, log retrieval, resource troubleshooting, and coordination with Platform teams on cluster-level issues.
• Messaging & streaming platforms: Apache Kafka topic management, consumer group monitoring, lag analysis, and escalation to Platform for broker-level issues.
• Secrets & configuration management: HashiCorp Vault — secrets retrieval, token/lease troubleshooting, policy review, and escalation to Security teams for certificate and secrets rotation.
• Monitoring & observability: Proficiency in at least two production monitoring toolsets (e.g. Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, Prometheus/Grafana) alert triage, dashboard interpretation, log analysis, and tuning requests.
• Middleware platforms: Working knowledge of middleware infrastructure including application servers, messaging brokers, storage integrations, and network-layer dependencies sufficient to triage, gather diagnostics, and route correctly to L3.
• Incident and ticketing platforms: ServiceNow or equivalent ITSM tooling incident creation, SLA tracking, problem record management, and reporting.
• MTTR and operational metrics: Ability to build and maintain operational dashboards and reports covering MTTR, SLA compliance, alert-to-incident ratio, repeat incident rate, and deployment success rate.
• Minimum 5 years of hands-on environment operations, production support, or infrastructure operations experience, including interdisciplinary experience across four or more of the following: application deployment pipelines, container platform operations, middleware support, incident management, monitoring and observability, configuration management, release engineering, platform operations, or scripting and automation.
• Technical experience and comprehensive knowledge of production environment failure modes — including deployment failures, configuration drift, platform instability, and integration breakdowns — and the methodologies used to diagnose and resolve them.
• Demonstrated experience defining and enforcing SLA frameworks in a tiered support model (L1/L2/L3 or equivalent).
• Familiarity with financial services or other regulated-industry production environments is a strong advantage — understanding of change governance, audit requirements, and production access controls.
• Industry knowledge of current and emerging practices in environment operations, platform reliability, and support automation.
• Shift work and on-call availability required — including 24×7 on-call response capacity and availability during planned and emergency maintenance windows.
• Previous people management or team lead experience required; formal people management experience strongly preferred.

Nice To Haves

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or equivalent platform certification
• ITIL Foundation or above — demonstrating grounding in incident, problem, and change management frameworks
• HashiCorp Vault Associate
• Harness Certified Continuous Delivery Architect
• Relevant cloud platform certification (AWS, Azure, or GCP) at associate level or above

Responsibilities

• Lead L1 and L2 support engineers in all incident response activities including triage, investigation, coordination, resolution, closure, and post-incident reporting.
• Oversee technical analysis of environment incidents across application deployments, middleware, and platform layers while coordinating response activities with internal engineering, platform, and application development teams.
• Serve as Tier 3 escalation point for complex incidents beyond L2 capability — triaging, directing, and driving resolution across Platform (k8s, Kafka, TFE), S&I (deployment, middleware, storage, network), Security (Vault, certs, secrets), and App Dev teams.
• Own the full incident lifecycle — from first alert through to RCA documentation and permanent fix or accepted workaround.
• Drive post-incident reviews for all P1 and P2 incidents, ensuring root cause is identified, documented, and actioned — not filed.
• Define, publish, and enforce SLA targets across all severity levels: P1 (Critical): 15-minute response, 2-hour resolution; P2 (High): 30-minute response, 4-hour resolution; P3 (Medium): 2-hour response, 8-hour resolution; P4 (Low): 4-hour response, 24-hour resolution.
• Monitor SLA compliance in real time; escalate breaches immediately and report trends to leadership on a sprint cadence.
• Ensure incident priority classifications are accurate, consistent, and applied at point of triage — not revised post-resolution.
• Publish monthly SLA compliance reports to leadership with trend analysis and improvement actions.
• Lead alert tuning and noise reduction initiatives across monitoring toolsets — on-call engineers are paged for situations requiring human judgement, not system noise.
• Track and publish the alert-to-incident ratio each sprint; hold the team accountable to a visible and improving trend.
• Drive continuous improvement on Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) — analyzed by environment, severity, and team tier; reported quarterly with commentary on trend and action.
• Identify recurring incident patterns and open Problem records; drive permanent fixes, not repeated workarounds.
• Lead automation and tooling initiatives to reduce toil, accelerate triage, and eliminate manual steps from the support workflow.
• Ensure accurate, complete documentation for every incident — symptoms, steps taken, diagnostics, resolution, and RCA where applicable.
• Own the runbook library — every novel resolution produces a runbook published to L1 before the incident is closed; coverage gaps are tracked and closed sprint-on-sprint.
• Maintain environment configuration documentation and operational procedures in a current, accessible, and team-reviewed state.
• Lead a team of 6–10 L1 and L2 support engineers and contingent labor within the Environment Operations function.
• Manage team scheduling to ensure full coverage of production support windows including on-call rotations, shift handoffs, and escalation availability for 24×7 support responsibilities.
• Perform all talent management functions including performance reviews, direct and timely feedback, goal setting, and administrative functions as required.
• Confer with and advise team members on operational policies and procedures, technical priorities, escalation paths, and resolution methods.
• Promote employee development through structured career-planning sessions, identification of training opportunities, and scheduling of relevant conferences, certifications, and skill-building programs.
• Build and maintain a clear L1 to L2 career progression path — internal promotion is the first option for L2 vacancies.
• Review scheduling, training plans, and team capacity with senior leadership on a regular cadence to ensure the team is resourced and developed for the demands of the role

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: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed