Principal DevOps Engineer, Continuous Delivery

NinjaOne

3d•$200,000 - $260,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Principal DevOps Engineer on NinjaOne's DevOps Engineering team, you will be a key technical leader responsible for evolving how software is deployed and released at scale. You will own the design, architecture, and continuous improvement of NinjaOne's Continuous Delivery and deployment automation capabilities ensuring that code moves from commit to production quickly, safely, predictably, and with minimal manual intervention. This role has a strong emphasis on Continuous Delivery, deployment automation, progressive delivery, release orchestration, feature flagging, and automated rollback. You will help establish the technical patterns and platforms that enable engineering teams to deploy frequently while maintaining strong production safety and operational controls. This is a highly hands-on role. You will design and implement deployment systems, build automation, solve complex release engineering problems, and provide technical leadership across Engineering, QA, Security, SRE, and Architecture. You will also work with cloud infrastructure and Infrastructure as Code as part of the deployment lifecycle. Strong cloud and IaC knowledge is important, but the primary focus of this role is how software gets safely and reliably deployed to production. NinjaOne operates at a significant scale, supporting millions of endpoints through a cloud-based platform. This role provides an opportunity to influence the next generation of our software delivery and release engineering capabilities. We're a fast-paced, rapidly growing company, and this role is ideal for someone who thrives on owning the "last mile" of software delivery — turning builds into safe, automated, repeatable production deployments and helping evolve NinjaOne toward a modern, deploy-at-will model.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in DevOps, Release Engineering, Platform Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline
Deep hands-on experience designing and operating Continuous Delivery and deployment automation platforms at scale, including automated release workflows, artifact promotion, validation, and rollback
Strong understanding and practical experience with progressive delivery strategies (canary, blue/green, rolling, controlled rollouts) and feature flagging for controlled feature releases, including automated canary analysis and integrating feature flagging directly with deployment platforms
Strong experience with CI/CD platforms (e.g., CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, or equivalent), including building reusable pipelines, deployment frameworks, and automation, as well as modernizing or migrating enterprise CI/CD and deployment platforms
Strong programming and scripting skills in Go, Python, Bash, or similar languages
Strong understanding of artifact management and promotion across environments
Experience integrating automated testing, security, quality, and operational checks into deployment pipelines, along with deployment observability and release metrics and integrating application observability and production telemetry into automated release decisions
Solid understanding of cloud environments (preferably AWS), Infrastructure as Code (preferably Terraform), and containers/Kubernetes or ECS, including Kubernetes deployment tooling such as Helm or Kustomize, GitOps or declarative deployment models, and multi-region application deployments
Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills across distributed systems and production environments
Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives across multiple engineering teams, with strong communication and technical leadership skills, including establishing deployment standards across large engineering organizations and coaching engineers on deployment automation, release engineering, and deployment safety best practices
Experience with software supply-chain security and DevSecOps practices
A track record of reducing deployment lead time, change failure rate, and time to recover through automation and progressive delivery practices

Nice To Haves

Knowing large-scale datastore bottlenecks, asynchronous application design and client-server architecture will help you.

Responsibilities

Own Continuous Delivery End to End: Design, build, and continuously improve our Continuous Delivery pipelines — from artifact promotion through progressive rollout to production. You will be the technical owner of how software gets deployed, promoted, validated, and rolled back across environments and regions.
Architect Deployment Automation: Build highly automated deployment workflows that eliminate manual release steps and enable engineering teams to deploy safely and consistently. Design reusable deployment frameworks and automation that can support multiple applications, services, environments, and deployment models.
Design Progressive Delivery Strategies: Architect and implement progressive deployment patterns including blue/green, canary, rolling, percentage-based, and regional deployments. Build automated health checks and deployment gates that determine whether a release should continue, pause, or roll back.
Build Automated Release Orchestration: Design and implement release orchestration across services, environments, and regions. Automate deployment sequencing, dependency management, artifact promotion, validation, release approvals where required, and rollback.
Drive Feature Flagging & Controlled Releases: Partner with Engineering and Architecture to establish and evolve NinjaOne's feature flagging capabilities. Enable teams to decouple deployment from feature release and safely control when and where functionality becomes available. Build integration between feature flagging and deployment workflows to support gradual, canary, percentage-based, regional, and tenant-based rollouts.
Build and Improve CI/CD Pipelines: Lead the evolution of NinjaOne's CI/CD framework, with particular depth on the Continuous Delivery side. Build pipelines that integrate artifact management, environment promotion, automated testing, deployment automation, security checks, quality gates, feature flags, deployment health checks, progressive rollout, and automated rollback.
Establish Deployment Guardrails: Build automated controls that make production deployments safer without introducing unnecessary manual processes. Establish deployment criteria based on application health, automated testing, code quality, security signals, monitoring, and production telemetry.
Improve Deployment Observability: Build visibility into the health and performance of the deployment lifecycle. Establish metrics and dashboards for deployment success rate, deployment duration, rollback rate, change failure rate, and other delivery signals. Integrate deployment telemetry with application and infrastructure observability to support automated release decisions.
Work with Infrastructure & Cloud Platforms: Work closely with Cloud Platform, SRE, and Infrastructure teams to ensure deployment systems integrate effectively with the underlying infrastructure. Use Infrastructure as Code and cloud automation where appropriate to support application deployment and release workflows. You should be comfortable troubleshooting deployment issues involving cloud infrastructure, networking, IAM, containers, Kubernetes/ECS, configuration, and other platform dependencies.
Drive Deployment Reliability: Partner with SRE and Engineering to improve deployment reliability and reduce deployment-related incidents. Participate in complex deployment and production incidents, lead technical investigations, and drive permanent remediation. Build automated recovery and rollback capabilities that minimize customer impact when releases do not behave as expected.
Provide Technical Leadership: Serve as a technical authority for Continuous Delivery, deployment automation, progressive delivery, and release engineering. Lead complex technical initiatives from architecture and design through implementation. Define technical standards, reference architectures, and best practices for deployment and release automation. Mentor senior and staff engineers and raise the technical bar across the DevOps organization.
Other duties as needed.