DevOps/Platform Engineer SME

DevOps/Platform Engineer SME

Location: Westchester, IL

Duration: 6-12 Months

Job Description

About the Role:

We are seeking an accomplished and highly experienced Staff Engineer to join our Engineering team, focusing on Application Platform & Tooling, CI/CD & Automation, Developer Experience & Enablement. In this pivotal role, you will be instrumental in designing, building, and optimizing the platforms, tools, and processes that empower our engineering organization to develop, test, and deploy software with speed, confidence, and quality. You will act as a technical leader, influencing architectural decisions, championing best practices, and mentoring other engineers to elevate our overall organization's engineering maturity.

Responsibilities:

• Strategic Leadership & Vision:
  • Define and drive the technical strategy and roadmap for our Developer Experience & Engineering Enablement initiatives, aligning them with overall company goals and engineering objectives
  • Identify critical pain points and opportunities for improvement across the software development lifecycle, proposing and leading impactful solutions
  • Champion a culture of automation, self-service, continuous improvement, and blameless post-mortems
• Application Platform & Tooling Development:
  • Architect, design, and implement scalable, reliable, and secure internal developer platforms, tools, and services (e.g. Internal Developer Portals like schema registries)
  • Lead the selection, integration, and optimization of third-party and open-source tools for CI/CD, source code management, artifact management, testing, security, and observability.
  • Develop and maintain automation scripts, configure, and manage cloud infrastructure and environments.
• CI/CD Optimization & Automation:
  • Optimize CI/CD pipelines for performance, security, and efficiency (e.g., caching, parallelization, automated security scans).
  • Develop and enforce standards and governance for CI/CD practices across the organization.
  • Enable inner-sourcing and create reusable pipeline templates and catalogs.
• Developer Experience & Engineering Enablement:
  • Focus on reducing cognitive load and friction for developers, enabling them to easily, safely, and confidently build and deploy.
  • Standardize and streamline developer environments to ensure reproducibility and scalability.
  • Improve developer onboarding and offboarding experiences through automated tooling and clear documentation.
• Observability & Reliability:
  • Implement and enhance monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to provide deep insights into platform and application health.
  • Define and track key DORA metrics and other developer experience metrics to measure impact and drive data-driven improvements.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and provide expert-level support for critical infrastructure and tooling issues.
• Security & Compliance:
  • Embed security controls and compliance practices early into the SDLC (DevSecOps).
  • Implement automated solutions for vulnerability scanning, policy enforcement, and auditability.
• Collaboration, Coaching & Mentorship:
  • Collaborate closely with Engineering teams, SRE, Security and Infrastructure teams to understand their needs and provide effective solutions.
  • Mentor and provide technical guidance to junior and mid-level engineers, fostering their growth and development.
  • Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Qualifications:

• Experience:
  • 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on DevOps, DevEx, SRE, or Platform Engineering roles.
  • Proven track record of designing, building, and operating large-scale, distributed systems and internal platforms.
  • Demonstrated experience in a Staff, Lead Engineer capacity, driving technical initiatives and mentoring teams.
• Technical Expertise:
  • Deep expertise with cloud platforms (e.g. Azure, AWS) and cloud-native architectures.
  • Extensive experience with containerization technologies (i.e. Docker) and orchestration platforms (e.g. Kubernetes, AKS, EKS)
  • Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools (e.g. Terraform, Ansible).
  • Strong programming skills in one or more languages (e.g. C#, Python, Go, Java, TypeScript)
  • Extensive experience with .Net or JVM ecosystem
  • Expertise with CI/CD systems (e.g. ADO, GitHub Actions, CircleCI)
  • Experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g. Datadog, Honeycomb, Prometheus, Grafana)
  • Familiarity with security and compliance tooling (e.g. Snyk, Checkmarx)
  • Experience with developer tools (e.g. GitHub, Artifactory, SonarQube)
• Skills & Attributes:
  • Exceptional problem-solving, analytical, and debugging skills.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical concepts to diverse audiences
  • Strong leadership qualities, including the ability to influence without direct authority, drive consensus, and inspire teams
  • Proactive, self-motivated, and adaptable to change in a fast-paced environment
  • A strong "customer-centric" mindset, viewing developers as internal customers
  • Ability to balance technical excellence with business needs and deliver practical, high-impact solutions

Bonus Points:

• Familiarity with generative AI for developer assistance (e.g. intelligent documentation, Amazon Q for Dev, Co-pilot, Cursor, Windsurf)
• Experience in a hybrid cloud environment
• Contributions to open-source projects