Senior Engineering Manager – DevOps, Infrastructure & Release Engineering

Abacus Insights•Boston, MA

2d•Remote

About The Position

As a Senior Engineering Manager for DevOps, Infrastructure, and Release Engineering, you will lead teams responsible for the reliability, scalability, and safe delivery of our SaaS platforms. This role owns the end‑to‑end release lifecycle— through CI/CD, environment promotion, and production deployment—ensuring releases are repeatable, observable, auditable, and low‑risk. You will balance senior‑level people leadership with deep technical oversight of release engineering systems, cloud infrastructure, and operational excellence. You will partner closely with Product Engineering, Quality Engineering, Security, and Operations to eliminate release friction, reduce deployment risk, and improve time‑to‑value without compromising stability or compliance. This role is ideal for an experienced leader who has lived through failed releases, scale pain, and operational incidents—and knows how to design systems and teams that prevent them from recurring.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure roles
At least 5 years managing engineering managers and/or senior technical teams
Prior hands‑on experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines for SaaS platforms
Strong experience with AWS, and Azure . GCP operating models is a plus
Deep understanding of: Release engineering principles, CI/CD automation, Infrastructure as Code, DevOps and SRE best practices
Experience supporting high‑availability, distributed systems in production
Strong track record improving reliability, deployment safety, and operational maturity
Excellent communication, decision‑making, and stakeholder management skills
Must have hands on experience in these key tools and technologies (representative, not exhaustive list): CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps; Infrastructure: Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM/Bicep; Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm; Release & Governance: Feature flags (LaunchDarkly), change management automation; Observability: CloudWatch, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry; Security & Compliance: SAST/DAST tools, policy-as-code, secrets management; Cloud Platforms: AWS (primary), Azure, GCP
You hold relentlessly high bar for release quality and operational safety
You know when to slow down to move faster later
You can say “no” to unsafe releases—and explain why with credibility
You lead calmly during incidents and decisively after them
You model accountability, empathy, and engineering excellence in equal measure

Nice To Haves

GCP operating models is a plus

Responsibilities

Lead, coach, and grow DevOps, Infrastructure, and Release Engineering teams across geographies
Establish clear ownership and accountability across CI/CD, environments, and production readiness
Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, goal setting, and career development planning
Hire, onboard, and retain senior DevOps and release engineering talent
Foster a culture of operational ownership, blameless postmortems, and high availability
Remove systemic blockers so teams can focus on building resilient delivery pipelines—not firefighting
Own the release engineering strategy for a SaaS platform supporting frequent, reliable deployments
Design and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines that support: Trunk-based or hybrid branching strategies, Automated testing gates (unit, integration, security, performance), Progressive delivery (feature flags, canaries, blue-green deployments)
Establish deployment standards, change classification, and risk levels across teams
Reduce release toil, manual steps, and human error through automation
Drive improvements in deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (DORA metrics)
Ensure consistent release processes across services, platforms, and cloud environment
Proven experience implementing and operating observability for cloud-based SaaS platforms, including metrics, logs, traces, and alerting
Ability to integrate observability into CI/CD and release workflows to enable release confidence, faster incident detection, and reduced MTTR
Provide technical leadership across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments
Ensure infrastructure and delivery pipelines follow security, compliance, and cloud best practices
Partner with Architecture and Security to enforce: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM/Bicep), Secure-by-default deployments, Policy-as-code and guardrails
Influence architecture decisions to improve operability, scalability, and release safety
Guide teams in designing systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient
Own production readiness standards and release go/no‑go criteria
Ensure clear incident response processes, escalation paths, and on‑call readiness
Lead post-incident reviews with a focus on systemic fixes, not individual mistakes
Partner with engineering teams to reduce operational load and deployment risk over time
Partner deeply with Product, QE, Security, and Engineering leaders to align on release expectations
Communicate risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs clearly to senior and executive stakeholders
Represent DevOps and Release Engineering in customer, partner, and audit conversations as needed