Technical Operations Lead

Karsun Solutions, LLC•Herndon, VA

About The Position

The Technical Operations Lead will lead technical operations for a cloud-native AWS data and AI platform supporting a federal program. The role owns platform reliability, observability, incident response, platform engineering, and operationalization of data products. The lead works with the SRE Lead and cross-functional partners to establish and improve SRE practices, operational readiness, security, and compliance; manages platform capacity, cost, and performance; and mentors an operations/SRE team. The position requires eligibility to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance and authorization to work in the U.S. Candidates must reside in one of the listed states: CA, CO, DC, FL, GA, IL, MD, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, PA, SC, TX, or VA.

Requirements

10+ years of directly relevant IT work experience.
7+ years of technical operations, platform, or SRE experience supporting data-intensive systems, including 3+ years in AWS production environments.
Deep understanding of data products and product ownership, including data lineage, stewardship, SLAs, and consumer contracts.
Proven experience operating data platforms, including Databricks, Airflow, S3, and Kafka/Kinesis.
Strong knowledge of SRE practices, including SLI/SLO design, incident response, runbooks, and chaos or failure-mode testing.
Hands-on experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry, as well as logging and tracing systems.
Familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform or CloudFormation), CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or ArgoCD), container orchestration (EKS/Kubernetes), and scripting (Python and Bash).
Solid security and compliance experience in federal environments, including RBAC, encryption, and secrets management.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to produce clear runbooks and RCA reports and brief leadership.
Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance.
Must be authorized to work in the U.S.
Must reside in CA, CO, DC, FL, GA, IL, MD, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, PA, SC, TX, or VA.

Nice To Haves

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification.
Prior experience with ML lifecycle/MLOps tooling such as SageMaker or Databricks and feature stores.
Experience migrating teams from DevOps to SRE and driving organizational change.
Experience with cost optimization and governance of large AWS data/ML workloads.
Familiarity with federal program processes, change control, and procurement cycles.

Responsibilities

Own platform availability, reliability, and operational runbook development for data pipelines, feature stores, model serving, and supporting infrastructure.
Work with the SRE Lead to design and operationalize SRE practices, including SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, and toil reduction, supporting a transition from DevOps to SRE.
Build and maintain monitoring, alerting, and observability across data and AI stacks, including metrics, distributed tracing, and centralized logging.
Lead incident management, including on-call rotations, incident response, root-cause analysis, remediation tracking, and continuous improvement.
Automate operational workflows for deployments, scaling, and recovery using infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines.
Define and enforce runbooks, backup and restore procedures, RTO/RPO, and disaster recovery for data and ML systems.
Partner with data product owners, ML engineers, security, and compliance teams to ensure production readiness, access controls, and federal compliance.
Manage capacity planning, cost optimization, and performance tuning of AWS resources for data and ML workloads.
Mentor and lead an operations/SRE team, set technical priorities, and coordinate cross-functional platform changes.
Maintain vendor and third-party integrations and coordinate upgrades and patching under federal change-control processes.
Track and report reliability metrics and operational maturity improvements to stakeholders.