Staff DevOps Engineer

Newmark•Chicago, IL

17d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Staff DevOps Engineer to own and drive the technical architecture for complex, cross-team infrastructure initiatives. This role involves designing, building, and maintaining scalable, resilient cloud-native infrastructure and deployment pipelines that support Newmark's platform footprint, including Line of Business Applications, AI Platforms (Newmark Document Intelligence (NDI), Ngage, the Newmark AI Exchange), and core enterprise systems. A key aspect of this role is to architect and integrate agentic AI workflows into DevOps and platform operations, such as automated incident triage, self-healing infrastructure, and AI-assisted change review, to enhance reliability and efficiency. The successful candidate will set engineering standards and best practices for infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, security, and observability across the organization, including the responsible use of AI-assisted operations tooling. This position will also lead technical design reviews, provide architectural guidance, and partner with leadership to translate business strategy into scalable infrastructure roadmaps. You will identify and resolve systemic performance, reliability, and scalability issues, own incident response and disaster recovery strategy, and mentor engineers to raise the technical bar. Driving the adoption of modern infrastructure tools and practices to improve developer velocity and system resilience, while staying aware of emerging technologies in AI-driven infrastructure automation, is also crucial.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in infrastructure/software engineering, with demonstrated experience architecting cloud infrastructure and CI/CD systems at scale.
Expert-level proficiency in infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Bicep, or similar) and CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or Jenkins).
Deep understanding of distributed systems, containerization, and orchestration (Kubernetes) at scale.
Strong experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and cloud-native architecture patterns.
Proven track record of leading large-scale technical initiatives across multiple teams.
Strong background in observability and monitoring tooling (metrics, logging, tracing) and incident response practices.
Deep understanding of security and compliance practices — identity (Zero Trust, Entra ID/Azure AD), secrets management, and audit/change controls in a regulated or public-company environment (SOX or similar).
Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and influence technical direction without direct reporting authority.

Nice To Haves

Nice to have experience designing multi-agent systems, tool-calling architectures, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines for operational or infrastructure use cases.
Nice to have Hands-on experience building or integrating agentic AI systems, LLM-powered operations tooling, or AI agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, MCP) into infrastructure and DevOps workflows.
Nice to have Track record of speaking, writing, or open-source contributions that demonstrate technical thought leadership, especially in applied AI and infrastructure automation.
Experience with event-driven architectures and real-time data processing (e.g., Kafka, Event Hubs, Kinesis).
Nice to have Familiarity with data platforms such as Databricks.
Prior experience in commercial real estate, fintech, or operations/transaction systems.

Responsibilities

Own and drive the technical architecture for complex, cross-team infrastructure initiatives spanning cloud platforms, CI/CD, and observability.
Design, build, and maintain scalable, resilient cloud-native infrastructure and deployment pipelines supporting Newmark's platform footprint, including Line of Business Applications, AI Platforms (Newmark Document Intelligence (NDI), Ngage, the Newmark AI Exchange), and core enterprise systems.
Architect and integrate agentic AI workflows (autonomous agents, LLM-driven automation, AI copilots) into DevOps and platform operations — such as automated incident triage, self-healing infrastructure, and AI-assisted change review — to drive reliability and efficiency.
Set engineering standards and best practices for infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, security, and observability across the organization, including responsible use of AI-assisted operations tooling.
Lead technical design reviews and provide architectural guidance to multiple engineering and platform teams.
Partner with product, security, and engineering leadership to translate business strategy into scalable infrastructure roadmaps, including AI-driven operational capabilities.
Identify and resolve systemic performance, reliability, and scalability issues across cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines.
Own incident response and disaster recovery strategy for platforms in scope, driving blameless postmortems and durable, systemic fixes.
Mentor and coach senior and mid-level engineers, raising the technical bar across the organization on both platform engineering and applied AI/automation practices.
Drive adoption of modern infrastructure tools and practices to improve developer velocity and system resilience.
Maintain awareness of emerging technologies and industry trends, particularly in AI-driven infrastructure automation, and assess their applicability to the business.