Team Lead, DevOps Engineering

ANVIL

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Team Lead DevOps Engineering, you will guide a team of senior and intermediate DevOps engineers while remaining a meaningful technical contributor to the systems you help design and operate. This is a role for someone who has developed serious depth across the DevOps and platform engineering stack and is ready to grow their impact through the people and architecture around them, not just the pipelines and infrastructure they personally build. The majority of your time will be directed toward your team: conducting pipeline and infrastructure reviews, mentoring engineers across experience levels, upholding standards around deployment reliability, security posture, and operational repeatability, and supporting your direct reports through regular 1:1s, honest performance conversations, and deliberate career development. Your remaining time keeps you close to the technical work; contributing to architecturally significant deployment systems, shaping CI/CD strategy, informing decisions around containerization and cloud infrastructure, and ensuring your instincts stay current enough to lead with credibility. You will work closely with backend, frontend, and platform teams to ensure deployment processes are reliable, well-documented, and designed to hold up under the demands of mission-critical, air-gapped operational environments. You will be the person your team looks to for technical direction, a clear quality bar, and the kind of candid and constructive guidance that helps them grow. This is a full-time position based in Ottawa / Remote. Eligible candidates must either possess or be eligible to obtain a Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance.

Requirements

Eligible for Government of Canada Top Secret security clearance
8–12 years of experience in DevOps or platform engineering, with significant production-grade work in CI/CD pipeline design, containerization, and orchestration
Demonstrated experience leading or formally mentoring other engineers, whether through a prior lead role or a consistent track record of raising the quality and capability of those around them
Deep, hands-on experience designing and maintaining automated build and deployment pipelines across multiple delivery mechanisms (cloud, virtual machines, appliance-based), sufficient to review others' work with authority and coach engineers through complex problems
Expert knowledge of containerization and orchestration technologies including Docker, Docker Compose, and Kubernetes, with the architectural judgment to apply each appropriately
Experience applying DevSecOps practices: static code analysis, dependency vulnerability (CVE) scanning, and integrating security checks into CI/CD workflows
Experience conducting pipeline and infrastructure reviews as a primary quality gate, catching defects and shaping how a team thinks about deployment reliability, repeatability, and long-term maintainability
A clear and considered approach to technical leadership: able to set CI/CD and infrastructure direction, communicate the reasoning behind it, and bring a team along without creating bottlenecks
Strong coaching instincts (able to read where each engineer is, what they need to progress, and how to deliver feedback that sticks)
Comfortable holding a high bar for operational quality, deployment reliability, and security compliance
Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to represent your team's systems and technical decisions to frontend engineers, product stakeholders, and senior leadership alike
Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex system and integration failures, and to use those moments as structured learning opportunities for the team

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and experience helping a team operate effectively within sprint-based delivery cycles
Experience working in or closely with defence, public safety, or national security organizations
Experience with VM administration and hypervisor technologies (QEMU/KVM, VMware ESXi) and appliance-based deployment models
Experience contributing to platform-level infrastructure decisions, including cross-team deployment standards and API governance for internal tooling
Prior involvement in hiring processes, technical interviews, or onboarding programs for engineering teams

Responsibilities

Manage a team of senior and intermediate DevOps engineers, serving as their primary point of support, accountability, and professional development
Conduct regular 1:1s focused on growth, blockers, feedback, and career trajectories
Provide honest, timely, and well-framed performance feedback; contribute to formal performance reviews and help engineers understand what meaningful progress looks like for them
Foster a team culture where high standards and psychological safety coexist
Own the pipeline and infrastructure review process for your team's output, ensuring reviews are thorough, consistent, and serve as genuine learning moments rather than rubber stamps
Define and maintain DevOps coding standards, CI/CD design conventions, deployment practices, and security expectations across the team
Identify patterns in pipeline reliability or security issues and address them systematically
Serve as the escalation point for complex technical decisions within your team's domain
Contribute directly to architecturally significant pipeline systems, deployment automation, or areas of the infrastructure where your experience and judgment add the most value
Stay close enough to the day-to-day technical work to review code with authority, support engineers through hard problems, and make well-grounded infrastructure recommendations
Champion DevSecOps practices across the team, including security scanning integration, compliance automation, and reproducible deployment standards
Participate actively in sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives
Represent your team's progress, capacity, and technical needs clearly to product and engineering leadership
Review and provide feedback on requirements, design documents, and specifications on behalf of your team
Work closely with cross-functional partners to maintain delivery standards without sacrificing the quality bar your team is held to
Provide insights to enhance software provisioning, maintenance, and support procedures