Sr. Manager, Infrastructure and DevOps

Innovation Associates, Inc. • US,

2h • $148,750 - $201,250

About The Position

This player-coach role involves owning the infrastructure and automation substrate that engineering runs on, including internal dev/test/lab environments, CI/CD and GitHub platform, and the pipeline for creating a deliverable VM appliance. The initial reality involves managing hypervisors (Proxmox, VMware) with a mix of manual and partial automation, with the mission to consolidate this into a coherent, code-driven system. A strategic shift to shipping a preconfigured VM appliance requires building the image pipeline for golden images, versioning, and upgrade paths. The role requires hands-on coding in Terraform, Ansible, and pipeline code weekly, alongside leading a small team. A key aspect is working with agentic tooling, where continuous learning and experimentation are essential.

Requirements

• 8+ years of infrastructure/DevOps/platform engineering experience, with 2+ years leading engineers while remaining hands-on
• Deep, hands-on experience with programmatic hypervisor management — Proxmox, VMware vSphere, or equivalent, driven through APIs/Terraform providers, not consoles
• Strong Terraform proficiency: module design, state management, provider usage in real production systems
• Strong Ansible proficiency: roles, inventory design, idempotent configuration management at fleet scale
• GitHub platform experience: Actions pipelines, runner management, org administration
• Experience inheriting and consolidating inconsistent automation — you've turned a pile of scripts and snowflakes into an owned system before
• Real agentic development experience: daily-driver use of an agentic coding CLI (Claude Code, Codex, or opencode) on infrastructure work, with concrete examples and a clear verification discipline — either an experienced power user or a demonstrated rapid adopter
• Player-coach disposition with evidence: recent commits, recent incidents worked, recent code reviewed — leadership that stayed technical
• Demonstrated learning agility: a track record of self-driven adoption of unfamiliar technology — picked it up, shipped with it, made mistakes along the way, and can talk about those mistakes without flinching

Nice To Haves

• Packer or equivalent golden-image pipeline experience (directly relevant to the VM appliance work)
• Experience migrating VMware workloads to Proxmox or other alternatives (post-Broadcom licensing pressure)
• Experience shipping software as a virtual appliance or supporting customer-hosted/on-prem deployments
• Healthcare, pharmacy, or regulated-environment experience
• Observability tooling for infrastructure (metrics, logging, alerting for the environments themselves)
• Kubernetes or container orchestration experience (not the core of this role, but adjacent)
• Built agentic tooling, not just used it: custom Claude Code skills/slash commands, plugins, subagent definitions, hooks, or MCP servers — especially ones that encode infrastructure or operations workflows
• Designed multi-agent or automated agentic workflows (e.g., agents that plan/apply infrastructure changes, review Terraform plans, or run unattended remediation loops with guardrails)
• Contributions to agentic tooling ecosystems (published plugins, MCP servers, or skills; upstream contributions to agent frameworks)

Responsibilities

• Automate hypervisor-level provisioning (Proxmox, VMware) via APIs and providers — VM lifecycle, templates, networking, storage — replacing console-driven setup
• Make full NEXiA environment creation self-service: engineers request an environment, a pipeline builds it, and it gets torn down when idle
• Establish base image and template management so environments start from known-good, versioned foundations
• Bring the existing snowflake environments under management incrementally — inventory what exists, codify it, retire what isn't worth keeping
• Consolidate the existing partial Terraform/Ansible into a coherent, owned codebase: module structure, state management, secrets handling, naming conventions
• Establish IaC workflow discipline — plans reviewed via pull request, applies through pipelines, no out-of-band changes to managed infrastructure
• Set the standards for what “under code” means and drive the inconsistent middle ground toward them, pragmatically — codify what matters first, not everything at once
• Own the GitHub organization as a platform: repo standards, permissions, branch protections, Actions runners, artifact and package management
• Build and maintain the CI/CD pipelines engineering depends on — treat pipeline reliability and speed as a product with engineering teams as the customers
• Provide reusable pipeline building blocks (shared workflows, actions, runner images) so product teams don't each reinvent deployment
• Design and build the image pipeline that produces the customer-deliverable NEXiA VM: automated builds, configuration injection, versioning, and validation
• Solve the lifecycle problems that come with appliance delivery: upgrades of deployed VMs, patching, compatibility with customer hypervisor environments
• Partner with the NEXiA engineering and release teams so the appliance pipeline fits how the product is actually built and released
• Hire, mentor, and lead a small infrastructure/DevOps team while remaining in the code yourself
• Set technical direction through working examples — the first Terraform modules and pipelines establish the patterns the team follows
• Prioritize ruthlessly: this scope is bigger than the team, so sequencing (what gets automated first, what stays manual for now) is a core management skill here
• Represent infrastructure reality to engineering leadership — honest capacity, honest timelines, honest risk
• Work agentically as the default mode: direct coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, opencode) to generate Terraform modules and Ansible roles, understand inherited automation, and draft migration plans — then verify everything against real infrastructure behavior before it ships
• Enforce verification discipline on the team: AI will confidently generate a plausible-looking Proxmox provider config or Ansible role that is subtly wrong; terraform plan output, idempotency checks, and disposable test environments are the ground truth, not the generated code
• Extend the agentic tooling itself where it pays off — custom skills, slash commands, agents, and hooks that encode the team's infrastructure workflows so the leverage compounds
• Evolve the team's workflow as tooling changes — throughput here depends on leverage, not headcoun

Benefits

• Generous time off policy that allows you to put your family first
• Opportunity to work on the cutting edge of pharmacy automation in a high growth tech company
• Competitive benefits, salary, and talent development opportunities
• Commitment to professional development and working for a company where your voice is heard

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed