Chief Architect – DevOps & Observability

Chief Architect – DevOps & Observability

Location: Columbus, OH
Position Type: Long-Term Contract
Work Arrangement: Hybrid/Onsite as required

Job Summary

We are seeking a highly experienced Chief Architect – DevOps & Observability to define, govern, and drive enterprise-wide standards for DevSecOps, Platform Engineering, Cloud, CI/CD, and Observability across diverse technology stacks and application environments.

The ideal candidate will combine enterprise architecture, hands-on technical expertise, DevSecOps, cloud-native engineering, observability, technology evaluation, and transformation leadership. This role will lead initiatives from strategy and architecture through Proof of Value (POV), standardization, implementation, and enterprise-wide adoption.

Key Responsibilities

DevOps & DevSecOps Architecture

• Define and govern enterprise-wide DevOps and DevSecOps Gold Standards.
• Establish standards for source code management, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automated testing, artifact management, containerization, Kubernetes, GitOps, release and environment management.
• Develop enterprise reference architectures, technology patterns, reusable components, and Golden Paths.
• Define standardized CI/CD pipeline architectures and reusable templates.
• Establish security integration standards including SAST, DAST, SCA, container security, IaC security, secrets management, and policy enforcement.
• Develop DevSecOps patterns for cloud-native, containerized, VM-based, and legacy applications.

Technology Evaluation & Proof of Value

• Evaluate emerging DevOps, DevSecOps, Platform Engineering, Cloud, and Observability technologies.
• Develop technical evaluation frameworks and scorecards for technology selection.
• Lead POCs/POVs, including requirements, use cases, success criteria, architecture, and evaluation methodology.
• Perform Build vs. Buy vs. Partner assessments.
• Assess integration capabilities with existing enterprise platforms.
• Drive technology standardization and rationalization.

Observability Architecture

• Define enterprise Observability Gold Standards across applications, infrastructure, Kubernetes, databases, APIs, cloud platforms, and distributed systems.
• Establish standards for:
• Metrics
• Logs
• Traces
• Events
• APM
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Digital experience monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• API monitoring
• Database observability
• Kubernetes observability
• Cloud observability
• Define standardized instrumentation and telemetry requirements.
• Establish standards for Golden Signals, SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, KPIs, dashboards, alerts, and event correlation.
• Define observability data collection, retention, aggregation, and AIOps integration standards.
• Establish observability maturity models and assessment frameworks.

Enterprise Implementation & Adoption

• Lead implementation of DevSecOps and Observability standards across enterprise application teams.
• Assess applications against enterprise maturity models and identify gaps.
• Develop remediation roadmaps and implementation plans.
• Create reusable Terraform modules, CI/CD templates, security integrations, dashboards, instrumentation patterns, and deployment frameworks.
• Drive application onboarding to standardized DevSecOps and Observability platforms.
• Establish automated compliance and policy validation.
• Partner with AIOps and Operations teams for incident management, event correlation, RCA, and automation.
• Develop dashboards to measure adoption, compliance, engineering performance, and business value.