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Director, DevOps

AZ_Mesa_HQ

 

 

Position Overview

The Director, DevOps is a hands-on technology leader accountable for the strategy and the day-to-day execution of CI/CD, release engineering, and site reliability across our mobility business. The DevOps function operates in a hybrid environment that includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and on-premises data centers, in close partnership with the Cloud Engineering organization.

This is a working leadership role, not a layered management role. The Director leads a team of senior DevOps and SRE engineers directly — setting direction, designing the hardest pieces, writing and reviewing code, owning incidents, and shipping alongside the team. The right leader is energized by being close to the work, comfortable in a terminal and in front of executives in the same day, and uses that proximity to make better decisions faster.

You will own the build, release, and runtime reliability layers supporting a multitude of microservices and applications across the Verra Mobility portfolio. You will partner with peers in Cloud Engineering, Software Engineering, Architecture, Product, and Information Security, and you will be accountable for the reliability, security posture, and delivery velocity of the software your teams ship.

Key Responsibilities

Hands-On Technical Leadership

  • Lead from the front: design and contribute directly to pipelines, release automation, deployment tooling, and observability instrumentation. Pick up the hard problems alongside the team.
  • Own the technical direction for CI/CD, release engineering, and SRE practices across AWS, Azure, and on-prem workloads. Make architectural decisions for the delivery pipeline that span environments and product lines.
  • Personally review designs, pull requests, and significant pipeline or automation changes; raise the technical bar through high-signal feedback and pairing.
  • Set engineering standards — pipeline-as-code patterns, branching strategies, deployment patterns (blue/green, canary, feature flags), observability instrumentation — and ensure they are adopted in practice, not just documented.

Team Leadership & Direct Management

  • Directly manage a team of senior DevOps engineers and SREs, including hiring, performance management, growth, and compensation.
  • Build a small, senior, high-trust team where leadership is shared and engineers operate with autonomy and clear ownership.
  • Establish a culture of operational excellence, blameless learning, written communication, and disciplined engineering practice.
  • Manage the on-call rotation as a participant when needed, not as an observer. Hold the team to a sustainable paging volume and meaningful post-incident follow-through.

CI/CD & Release Engineering

  • Own the end-to-end CI/CD platform supporting hundreds of microservices and applications, including pipeline-as-code standards, build artifacts, container images, and deployment automation across Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.
  • Drive measurable, sustained improvement in DORA metrics: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and time to restore service.
  • Standardize branching strategies, release patterns, rollback procedures, and pre-production validation gates across the portfolio.
  • Partner with QE to embed automated testing — unit, integration, contract, performance, and security — into pipelines so that quality is enforced before production.

Reliability & Incident Management

  • Own the availability and performance of the production software the team is responsible for releasing. Define and maintain SLOs and error budgets for top-tier services, and hold both DevOps and product engineering accountable to them.
  • Serve as incident commander for high-severity production events. Drive the root-cause analysis personally on the most significant incidents and ensure corrective actions ship.
  • Own the observability practice for delivery: metrics, logs, traces, and synthetic monitoring that make production behavior visible to the teams that need it.
  • Champion chaos engineering, game days, and disaster recovery testing in coordination with Cloud Engineering to validate resilience of hybrid systems.

Security & Compliance

  • Partner with Information Security to embed shift-left security into every pipeline: SAST, DAST, SCA, container and IaC scanning, secrets management, signed artifacts, and supply-chain controls.
  • Manage secrets, certificates, and pipeline identity in coordination with Cloud Engineering and Information Security (AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault etc.).
  • Ensure pipeline and release controls satisfy compliance requirements relevant to mobility, payments, and government work (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, NIST, and similar); own engineering evidence for external audits.

Strategy & Roadmap

  • Own a 12–18 month roadmap for DevOps and SRE that balances reliability, security, developer experience, and delivery velocity; communicate trade-offs clearly to product and engineering leadership.
  • Instrument and act on developer experience signals: time to first deploy for a new service, build and deploy times, friction surveys, and toil reduction.
  • Drive modernization of legacy build, release, and deployment patterns; retire or consolidate redundant tooling rather than letting it accumulate.
  • Translate DevOps investment into outcomes that executive leadership can act on — DORA improvements, SLO attainment, and concrete examples of developer-experience gains.

Cross-Functional & Executive Partnership

  • Partner closely with the Cloud Engineering leader as a peer; align on the boundary between cloud infrastructure (their domain) and the delivery pipeline and runtime reliability (this role’s domain), and present a coordinated story to engineering and product leadership.
  • Partner with Software Engineering to ensure new services are built with pipeline, observability, and release templates from day one — not bolted on later.
  • Partner with Architecture to align DevOps direction with the broader technology roadmap, including migrations between legacy and modern platforms.
  • Translate platform reality into clear narratives for the CTO, CIO, and executive committee, including risk, investment trade-offs, and roadmap progress.
  • Engage with sales, customer success, and key customers when delivery reliability, security, or roadmap intersects with customer commitments.

Required Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent professional experience.
  • 10+ years of progressive engineering experience in DevOps, SRE, or Release Engineering, including 4+ years in a leadership role directly managing senior engineers.
  • Deep, current hands-on experience — you should be able to walk into a terminal, open a PR, and ship today. Recent leadership roles must include direct technical contribution, not just oversight.
  • Demonstrated experience operating delivery pipelines and production systems at scale across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments, with a clear understanding of the operational and security trade-offs between them.
  • Deep expertise in CI/CD platforms, specifically Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions (experience with Jenkins or GitLab CI a plus), including pipeline-as-code authoring, reusable templates, and self-hosted runner management.
  • Strong working knowledge of container build, registry, and deployment workflows (Docker, ACR, ECR, Harbor) and Kubernetes-based deployments (EKS, AKS, or self-managed).
  • Working knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code (Cloud Formation Templates, Terraform etc.) sufficient to collaborate effectively with Cloud Engineering on shared concerns such as deployment targets, networking for pipelines, and identity.
  • Strong scripting and programming skills in two or more of: Python, Go, Bash, PowerShell, or TypeScript/JavaScript. Comfortable reading and modifying code in any language the team encounters.
  • Experience implementing observability tooling such as Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or Azure Monitor / CloudWatch.
  • Track record of leading production incident response personally and driving measurable improvements to MTTR, change failure rate, and SLO attainment.
  • Experience supporting compliance regimes such as SOC 2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, or FedRAMP, including engineering evidence for external audits.
  • Clear, concise written communication. Comfortable engaging with the CTO, executive committee, and external customers, and equally comfortable in a design review or an incident bridge.
  • Must comfortable with commute into office 3 days a week.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience in mobility, transportation, tolling, parking, fleet, or other high-volume transaction-processing or IoT-adjacent industries.
  • Experience leading large-scale CI/CD consolidation or modernization (e.g., Jenkins-to-GitHub Actions, monolithic-pipeline to pipeline-as-code).
  • Experience operating in environments with both modern microservices and legacy applications under a unified delivery practice.
  • Familiarity with progressive delivery tooling (Argo CD, Flux, Spinnaker, LaunchDarkly, Unleash) and GitOps patterns.
  • Active participation in the broader engineering community: writing, conference speaking, open-source contribution, or industry advisory roles.

What Success Looks Like

  • Within 90 days: a current-state assessment of CI/CD, release, observability, and on-call practices across AWS, Azure, and on-prem, with a prioritized roadmap, named owners, and a clear point of view on what to keep, change, and retire.
  • Within 6 months: visible technical contribution from the Director on the hardest delivery problems; standardized pipeline patterns adopted by the majority of service teams; documented SLOs for top-tier services and a mature incident response process.
  • Within 12 months: sustained improvement in DORA metrics and SLO attainment; demonstrable reduction in MTTR; a small, senior, engaged team with clear ownership and growth paths; a healthy partnership with Cloud Engineering and a clear, shared model of responsibilities.

This position is not eligible for sponsorship now or in the feature.

Verra Mobility Values

An ideal candidate for this role naturally works in alignment with the Verra Mobility Core Values:

  • Own It. We focus on high performance and drive toward breakthrough outcomes. Our employees ensure accountability, optimize and align work, focus on the customer, and cultivate innovation.
  • Do What’s Right. We champion integrity and good character. Our team members model ethical behavior, demonstrate good judgment and are courageous.
  • Choose Courage Over Comfort. We lean into the conversations, decisions and actions that move the business forward, even when they feel uncomfortable. We challenge assumptions, address issues early and prioritize progress over ease.
  • Win Together. We believe in growing and inspiring people together. We seek people who collaborate, value differences, think and act globally, foster an engaging work environment, and recognize and develop others.

With your explicit consent which you provided as part of the application process, we will retain candidate personal data solely for the business purpose for which it was collected. In no event will we retain such data more than two (2) years following the closure of the recruitment process relating to the role for which you applied or in the event other related job opportunities arise within the company. Verra Mobility Applicant Privacy Notice

Verra Mobility is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. 

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