Run Operations Lead

Alter Domus • Chicago, ND

13d • $130,000 - $180,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Alter Domus is seeking a Run Operations & DevOps Leader to serve as the operational bridge between Product Engineering and Tech Ops, including Infrastructure and Service Desk. This hands-on leadership role is accountable for ensuring new and changed products enter production in a supportable, secure, and resilient state, remain stable and scalable, and continuously improve through operational feedback.

The role combines production operations, Reliability Engineering, and service management. The Senior Manager will lead and mentor a DevOps team, define engineering and automation standards, oversee hybrid cloud infrastructure and CI/CD capabilities, and coordinate high-impact production incidents. The role works across Product, Engineering, Information Security, Infrastructure, Networking, Service Management, and external partners to champion a reliability-first culture and support services operating within a 24/7 model.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, Tech Operations, application support, Site Reliability Engineering, systems engineering, or technology architecture.
• 4+ years of experience in technical leadership or people management, with demonstrated success leading operational improvement and transformation.
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and professional experience.
• At least 5 years supporting enterprise cloud platforms, with strong hands-on experience in AWS and working knowledge of Azure, GCP, or OpenShift.
• Proven experience with production readiness, service transition, major incident coordination, problem management, release governance, and change management.
• Strong hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, containers, orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and Git-based workflows.
• Practical knowledge of ITIL practices, ITSM, and CMDB platforms such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or Jira Assets.
• Knowledge of cloud services and architecture, including ELB/ALB, CloudFront, ECS, ECR, EKS, Lambda, and Route 53.
• Knowledge of infrastructure automation and configuration management using Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet.
• Knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes-based platforms, including service mesh, distributed tracing, and automated certificate management.
• Knowledge of CI/CD and development tooling such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, SonarQube, Artifactory, and ArgoCD.
• Linux administration across Red Hat, CentOS, or Ubuntu, and sound understanding of Windows servers, IIS, networks, certificates, and SQL databases.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language such as Python, Go, Bash, or Groovy.
• Knowledge of monitoring, observability, and application performance management tools such as Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, AppDynamics, New Relic, PRTG, or Azure Monitor.
• Strong leadership, coaching, and delegation skills, with the ability to build ownership and accountability across teams.
• Excellent troubleshooting, analytical, and problem-solving capability, with a strong sense of urgency for mission-critical issues.
• Clear communication and influencing skills across technical, non-technical, and senior stakeholders.
• Ability to make evidence-based go/no-go decisions and defer production when a service is not ready.
• Structured, documentation-oriented, and disciplined in following actions through to completion.
• Calm and organized under pressure, with the ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced operational environment.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain operational acceptance criteria for monitoring, backup and restore, documentation, support models, security, access, capacity, and disaster recovery.
• Lead go-live readiness reviews and provide go/no-go recommendations based on production risk and supportability.
• Coordinate knowledge transfer to Service Desk, Infrastructure, and support teams, ensuring runbooks, known errors, and escalation paths are complete.
• Ensure new and changed services, infrastructure components, dependencies, and ownership details are accurately recorded in the CMDB.
• Lead L2/L3 production escalations and major incident bridges across Product, Infrastructure, Security, and vendors, maintaining timely stakeholder communications.
• Facilitate post-incident reviews and root cause analysis, ensuring corrective and preventive actions are assigned, automated where possible, and closed on time.
• Identify recurring incidents and drive problem resolution across application code, infrastructure, and operational processes.
• Define and maintain L1, L2, Product, Infrastructure, and vendor escalation paths for each service.
• Act as the primary link between Product release planning and Tech change management.
• Ensure releases comply with change governance, including risk assessment, testing evidence, release gates, rollback plans, infrastructure impact, and communications.
• Coordinate release and maintenance windows and dependencies such as patching, upgrades, certificates, and capacity; maintain a consolidated calendar.
• Own the strategy and evolution of secure, reliable CI/CD and GitOps capabilities.
• Maintain high availability for business-critical applications and infrastructure, aligning service objectives to business needs and targeting 99.9% uptime where applicable.
• Define and monitor service level objectives, service level indicators, and error budgets for availability, response time, errors, jobs, databases, and certificates.
• Design end-to-end monitoring, telemetry, and alerting.
• Monitor capacity, performance, and cost trends; raise risks and drive timely remediation.
• Ensure backup, restore, and disaster recovery tests are planned, executed, and documented for critical services, with realistic RTO and RPO targets.
• Oversee the design, implementation, and operation of secure, scalable hybrid and public cloud infrastructure.
• Define reusable infrastructure-as-code patterns that promote immutable, consistent, and auditable environments.
• Guide implementation and operation of container platforms, including service mesh, distributed tracing, and certificate automation.
• Create self-service automation paths for Product teams and reduce operational toil across deployments, health checks, alert handling, and recurring support activities.
• Identify opportunities to improve the quality, cost, and speed of the software delivery lifecycle across cloud, application, and quality engineering.
• Lead, develop, and mentor DevOps and Systems engineers, including senior individual contributors, fostering collaboration, inclusion, accountability, and technical excellence.
• Define and evolve engineering standards and best practices focused on automation, stability, security, reusability, and adaptability.
• Maintain clear RACIs between Product and Tech teams, including accountability for building, running, supporting, and approving services.
• Ensure runbooks, architecture diagrams, support documentation, and operational records remain current and validated.
• Produce regular service and team reporting on availability, incidents, changes, open problems, risks, technical debt, delivery metrics, and KPIs.
• Bring operational feedback, security findings, and reliability improvements into Product backlogs and support audit, compliance, security, and data privacy requirements.
• Manage team budgets and cloud expenditure, driving cost optimization and operational efficiency.

Benefits

• Support for professional accreditations.
• Flexible arrangements and generous holidays, plus an additional day off for your birthday.
• Continuous mentoring along your career progression.
• Active sports, events, and social committees across offices.
• 24/7 support available from the Employee Assistance Program.
• Opportunity to invest in the company’s growth and success through the Employee Share Plan.
• Additional local benefits depending on location.
• Alter Domus Academy learning resources, including LinkedIn Learning.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior