Zealant Consulting Group

DevOps Lead – DevSecOps &amp; Platform Engineering

About the Role
We are looking for an experienced DevOps Lead – DevSecOps &amp; Platform Engineering to define and lead our DevOps, DevSecOps, and platform engineering strategy across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
In this leadership role, you will drive infrastructure automation, CI/CD, Kubernetes platforms, cloud operations, security engineering, and reliability initiatives. You will lead and mentor engineering teams while ensuring platforms remain scalable, resilient, secure, compliant, and cost-efficient.
The ideal candidate combines deep hands-on technical expertise with strategic leadership, strong stakeholder management, and experience operating large-scale production infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities
1. Leadership &amp; Platform Strategy
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Define and execute the DevOps, DevSecOps, SRE, and platform engineering roadmap.
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Lead, mentor, and develop DevOps/SRE engineers, establishing engineering standards for code reviews, on-call operations, and incident management.
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Collaborate with engineering, security, product, and executive leadership on architecture, capacity planning, and infrastructure cost optimization.
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Own technology selection, vendor management, tooling budgets, and build-versus-buy decisions.
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Drive platform standardization, automation, and continuous operational improvement.
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2. Infrastructure, Cloud &amp; Automation
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Architect and govern scalable CI/CD pipelines across on-premises, cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), and hybrid environments.
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Drive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) adoption using Terraform, Ansible, or Pulumi, including reusable modules, state management, and configuration drift detection.
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Lead containerization and Kubernetes platform strategy, including multi-cluster and multi-region deployments.
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Design and manage hybrid cloud workloads using platforms such as Google Anthos or Azure Arc.
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Build and maintain automated infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, deployment, and rollback processes.
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Establish GitOps-based delivery practices using tools such as Argo CD and related CI/CD platforms.
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Ensure infrastructure scalability, availability, performance, and operational efficiency.
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3. DevSecOps, Security &amp; Compliance
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Integrate security into the software development lifecycle through SAST, DAST, SCA, container scanning, IaC scanning, and secrets management.
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Implement software supply-chain security practices, including SBOM generation, SLSA principles, and container image signing.
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Enforce Zero Trust architecture, least-privilege IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, key management, and network segmentation.
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Implement policy as code using OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno, or HashiCorp Sentinel.
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Lead risk assessments, threat modeling, vulnerability management, patch governance, and remediation tracking against defined SLAs.
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Establish security controls, audit readiness, and compliance processes aligned with ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, and other applicable frameworks.
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Partner with security and compliance teams to strengthen infrastructure governance and secure-by-design engineering practices.
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4. Reliability, Observability &amp; Incident Management
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Define and implement Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets.
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Establish observability across infrastructure and applications using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, and OpenTelemetry.
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Lead incident response, root cause analysis, postmortems, and corrective action tracking.
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Develop strategies to improve availability, performance, fault tolerance, and production reliability.
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Own disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning, including regular failover and recovery testing against defined RTO and RPO targets.
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Establish operational metrics and continuously improve platform reliability and engineering productivity.
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5. Networking, Governance &amp; Cost Optimization
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Oversee infrastructure networking, including firewalls, VPNs, DNS, load balancing, and network security controls.
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Drive infrastructure capacity planning, resource utilization, and cloud cost optimization through FinOps practices.
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Establish governance standards for infrastructure provisioning, deployment workflows, access controls, and operational processes.
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Communicate platform risks, security posture, reliability metrics, and technology roadmaps to senior leadership.
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Required Qualifications
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Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.
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15+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, infrastructure engineering, or platform engineering, including at least 4 years leading engineering teams or platforms.
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Deep expertise in on-premises infrastructure and hands-on experience with at least two major cloud platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
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Strong scripting and automation skills in Bash, Python, or Go.
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Production experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Argo CD, or CircleCI, along with GitOps practices.
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Extensive experience designing and operating large-scale Kubernetes platforms in production, including container orchestration and cluster management.
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Strong Infrastructure as Code experience using Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, or equivalent tools.
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Proven DevSecOps expertise across Zero Trust, IAM, PKI, encryption, secrets management, vulnerability management, and security auditing.
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Practical understanding of compliance frameworks such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, and HIPAA.
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Strong knowledge of networking fundamentals, firewalls, VPNs, DNS, load balancing, and network segmentation.
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Experience defining reliability standards, observability practices, incident response, and disaster recovery processes.
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Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to present technical strategy, operational risks, and investment priorities to senior leadership.
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Preferred Qualifications
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Relevant certifications such as CKA, CKS, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, AWS/Azure Security Specialty, CISSP, or CCSP.
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Experience with service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd.
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Familiarity with eBPF-based security tooling and runtime protection solutions such as Falco.
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Experience with security and vulnerability management tools such as HashiCorp Vault, Trivy, Snyk, SonarQube, Wiz, or Prisma Cloud.
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Proven experience leading cloud migrations, data center modernization, or on-premises-to-hybrid cloud transformations.
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Exposure to FinOps, platform-as-a-product models, and developer self-service platforms.
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Experience establishing engineering governance, security policies, and operational best practices across multiple teams.
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Personal Attributes
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Strategic thinker with the ability to remain hands-on when required.
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Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and decision-making skills under pressure.
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Clear communicator who builds trust across engineering, security, and business teams.
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Collaborative leader who develops teams and drives accountability.
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Passionate about automation, operational excellence, resilience, and secure-by-design systems.
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Role Highlights
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Lead DevOps, DevSecOps, and platform engineering strategy.
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Drive cloud, on-premises, and hybrid infrastructure modernization.
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Build secure, scalable, and highly available Kubernetes platforms.
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Influence engineering standards, security governance, and reliability practices.
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Partner with senior leadership on technology strategy and cost optimization.
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