Senior Manager, Software Development and Automation

5C Data Centers USA, Inc.•Springfield, OH

7d•$180,000 - $220,000•Remote

About The Position

We're looking for a Senior Manager, Software Development and Automation who is equal parts architect and builder. You'll need to see the target state, a proactive monitoring culture, a scalable automation platform, and the infrastructure foundation for AI, and be able to articulate and sell that vision to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Just as importantly, you'll need to know how to get there: breaking a multi-year vision into a practical, bottom-up sequence of steps a team can actually execute. You'll build out automation and configuration management practices, help stand up the platform foundation for new and AI-enabled products, and instill DevOps practices as the way 5C operates, not just within this team. Remaining legacy systems are kept stable through light-touch oversight, not a major modernization push.

Requirements

5+ years experience as a hands-on leader of a DevOps, infrastructure, or platform engineering team, combining people management with real technical depth.
Demonstrated ability to define and articulate a multi-year technical vision, and to sell it convincingly to both engineering and executive audiences.
Track record of turning that kind of vision into a practical, bottom-up execution plan, not just architecting on a whiteboard.
10+ years experience instilling DevOps practices and a proactive monitoring culture in an organization that didn't already have them, not just operating one that did.
10+ years experience standing up or scaling configuration management and automation practices in an environment carrying meaningful technical debt.
Working knowledge of container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), GitOps deployment workflows, and modern monitoring/observability tooling.
Solid infrastructure/solutions architecture experience: able to design target-state architecture and a practical migration path, not just operate what already exists.
Good judgment about where to invest limited engineering time, and comfort communicating those trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
Experience supporting AI/ML infrastructure or GPU-backed workloads.
Experience with legacy virtualization, storage, or cloud orchestration platforms (e.g., XenServer/KVM, CloudStack).
Familiarity with bare-metal infrastructure provisioning and certificate management at scale.
Database modernization experience.
Experience in a data center, colocation, or cloud infrastructure operator environment.

Responsibilities

Lead and develop a high-performing DevOps and software engineering team while remaining actively involved in technical execution, establishing scalable standards, and partnering with Product and Operations to drive roadmap priorities and technical direction.
Own the team's operational excellence by balancing short-term needs with long-term investments, leading incident management and on-call practices, and ensuring reliable, maintainable, and standardized solutions through strong technical governance.
Own and drive the technical vision for 5C's automation and AI infrastructure, translating long-term strategy into practical, incremental roadmaps that deliver measurable business value.
Champion DevOps, automation, and proactive monitoring practices across the organization, serving as a technical leader who enables teams company-wide to adopt standardized tools, processes, and operational best practices.
Build and mature infrastructure automation capabilities by implementing configuration management, version-controlled infrastructure changes, and repeatable deployment processes that improve consistency and operational efficiency.
Drive adoption of event-driven automation, self-healing systems, and comprehensive monitoring and observability practices to reduce manual effort, increase reliability, and enable proactive infrastructure management.
Establish a scalable, production-ready infrastructure foundation by implementing standardized platforms for orchestration, GitOps deployments, monitoring, security, certificate management, and disaster recovery, ensuring new environments are deployed with consistency and reliability.
Drive automation, governance, and engineering support for AI and emerging workloads, enabling new initiatives to launch on mature infrastructure platforms while accelerating adoption of standardized operational practices.
Keep remaining legacy infrastructure stable, secure, and supportable with minimal ongoing investment, as the team's focus shifts to automation and AI-enabled platforms.
Make pragmatic calls on when a legacy issue needs real engineering time versus when it can be contained or deprioritized.