Manager - Software Engineering DevOps

NO SPONSORSHIP - NO OPT

Manager, Software Engineering DevOps

Salary:$170k - $200k plus 15% Bonus

LOCATION: Chicago, IL

Hybrid 3 days onsite and 2 days remote

You will lead a team of 6-10, 24/7 support, L1, L2 support. Application deployment container platform ops middleware support incident management monitoring observability configuration release engineering platform operations scripting automation SLA frameworks harness Jenkins Kubernetes apache kakfa splunk Dynatrace datadog.

• Lead L1 and L2 support engineers in all incident response activities including triage, investigation, coordination, resolution, closure, and post-incident reporting.
• Oversee technical analysis of environment incidents across application deployments, middleware, and platform layers while coordinating response activities with internal engineering, platform, and application development teams.
• Serve as Tier 3 escalation point for complex incidents beyond L2 capability triaging, directing, and driving resolution across Platform (k8s, Kafka, TFE), S&I (deployment, middleware, storage, network), Security (Vault, certs, secrets), and App Dev teams.
• Own the full incident lifecycle from first alert through to RCA documentation and permanent fix or accepted workaround.
• Drive post-incident reviews for all P1 and P2 incidents, ensuring root cause is identified, documented, and actioned not filed.

Technical Skills:

• Deployment & Pipeline tooling: Harness (continuous delivery pipelines, deployment verification, rollback automation), Jenkins (CI/CD pipeline management, job configuration, build troubleshooting), GitHub (branching strategies, pull request workflows, pipeline integration).
• Container & orchestration platforms: Kubernetes (k8s) pod lifecycle management, namespace operations, log retrieval, resource troubleshooting, and coordination with Platform teams on cluster-level issues.
• Messaging & streaming platforms: Apache Kafka topic management, consumer group monitoring, lag analysis, and escalation to Platform for broker-level issues.
• Secrets & configuration management: HashiCorp Vault secrets retrieval, token/lease troubleshooting, policy review, and escalation to Security teams for certificate and secrets rotation.
• Monitoring & observability: Proficiency in at least two production monitoring toolsets (e.g. Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, PrometheGrafana) alert triage, dashboard interpretation, log analysis, and tuning requests.
• Middleware platforms: Working knowledge of middleware infrastructure including application servers, messaging brokers, storage integrations, and network-layer dependencies sufficient to triage, gather diagnostics, and route correctly to L3.
• Incident and ticketing platforms: ServiceNow or equivalent ITSM tooling incident creation, SLA tracking, problem record management, and reporting.
• MTTR and operational metrics: Ability to build and maintain operational dashboards and reports covering MTTR, SLA compliance, alert-to-incident ratio, repeat incident rate, and deployment success rate.

Education and/or Experience:

• Minimum 5 years of hands-on environment operations, production support, or infrastructure operations experience, including interdisciplinary experience across four or more of the following: application deployment pipelines, container platform operations, middleware support, incident management, monitoring and observability, configuration management, release engineering, platform operations, or scripting and automation.
• Technical experience and comprehensive knowledge of production environment failure modes including deployment failures, configuration drift, platform instability, and integration breakdowns and the methodologies used to diagnose and resolve them.
• Demonstrated experience defining and enforcing SLA frameworks in a tiered support model (L1/L2/L3 or equivalent).
• Familiarity with financial services or other regulated-industry production environments is a strong advantage understanding of change governance, audit requirements, and production access controls.
• Industry knowledge of current and emerging practices in environment operations, platform reliability, and support automation.
• Shift work and on-call availability required including 247 on-call response capacity and availability during planned and emergency maintenance windows.
• Previous people management or team lead experience required; formal people management experience