Senior DevOps Engineer

Position Overview

The Senior DevOps Engineer role based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, is focused on bridging development and operational teams to ensure enterprise applications and IT infrastructure assets are available, secure, scalable, and efficiently managed through automation. This role centers on delivering consistent operational outcomes by transforming platform and infrastructure requirements into resilient, repeatable processes, improving build and deployment pipelines, monitoring, and continuous improvements.

Key Duties

• Ensure high availability of enterprise applications by enhancing operational reliability and minimizing avoidable downtime, maintaining stable production environments during both standard and peak demand periods.
• Champion the automation and security of infrastructure and application delivery, reducing manual interventions via scalable, repeatable mechanisms for building, testing, and releasing software.
• Drive scalability improvements by evolving infrastructure architectures and operational procedures to accommodate growing platform complexity and business demands without excessive operational effort.
• Facilitate effective collaboration between development and operations teams by implementing workflows, technical safeguards, and clear handover protocols to accelerate delivery while safeguarding system stability and accountability.
• Enhance infrastructure and delivery security posture by integrating operational control measures, secure configuration standards, and strict change management protocols into daily engineering operations.
• Identify and mitigate operational risks, focusing on fragile processes, single points of failure, and environmental inconsistencies, and lead remediation efforts to boost system resilience and recovery preparedness.
• Improve system observability by ensuring comprehensive telemetry, alerting, and service-level monitoring to enable timely incident detection, effective response, and reliability prioritization.
• Support developer teams with robust infrastructure foundations, standardized deployment paths, and operational support frameworks to streamline software lifecycle processes.
• Lead continuous enhancements by analyzing incidents, recurring faults, and bottlenecks to refine processes, tools, and infrastructure architectures.
• Provide senior operational leadership by setting best practices, influencing engineering standards, and balancing priorities across speed, stability, security, and scalability.
• Manage deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle of Container Orchestration platforms including OpenShift and Kubernetes in alignment with organizational goals.
• Administer mixed operating system environments (Linux, Windows), handling troubleshooting, kernel tuning, and automating provisioning through Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform and Ansible.
• Oversee cloud infrastructure utilization in public and hybrid environments, optimizing use across OpenShift, Azure, and AWS to ensure high availability.
• Drive CI/CD pipeline improvements to reduce build durations by implementing caching, parallel executions, and multi-stage build strategies.
• Implement GitOps principles and conduct zero-downtime deployments using Blue/Green or Canary approaches.
• Troubleshoot pipeline failures, dependency conflicts, and broken integrations within development toolchains including Git, Jira, and Azure DevOps.
• Serve as the primary troubleshooter for performance issues such as application latency related to disk I/O, CPU, or network constraints.
• Establish and tune observability platforms using APM tools like Dynatrace and Datadog, creating custom dashboards with Grafana or Kibana and refining alerting systems to reduce noise.
• Resolve complex network issues involving connectivity, DNS, DHCP, and VPNs with packet analysis tools such as tcpdump and Wireshark; optimize load balancer configurations with HAProxy and Nginx.
• Proactively manage infrastructure risks by applying emergency patches for zero-day vulnerabilities and automating OS/application patch management cycles.
• Ensure adherence to organizational policies, industry standards, and regulatory mandates through security hardening practices (CIS Benchmarks, SELinux) and managing secret vaults.
• Lead quality assurance efforts including backup verifications and database disaster recovery drills to meet technical and business objectives.
• Enforce financial operations oversight (FinOps) to monitor and control cloud and infrastructure-related budgets ensuring fiscal responsibility.
• Optimize database performance via tuning SQL queries, indexes, and connection pools in collaboration with development teams.
• Manage resource allocation and auto-scaling by adjusting Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler thresholds based on real-time consumption metrics.
• Design and implement change management strategies for smooth infrastructure upgrades, migrations, and tooling updates.
• Liaise with key stakeholders to align infrastructure projects with business objectives minimizing disruptions and maximizing project impact.
• Develop and conduct training and communication programmes to prepare all stakeholders – including Developers, QA, and Security teams – for infrastructure transitions.
• Automate repetitive administrative tasks using scripting languages such as Python, Bash, and PowerShell to improve operational efficiency.
• Monitor emerging technologies and integrate innovations like Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and error budgets into operational and project activities.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation by adopting modern tools and methodologies to upgrade legacy infrastructure environments.

Qualifications and Experience

• A Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Possession of advanced degrees or professional certifications such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA/CKAD), AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, or Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) is preferred.
• At least 10 years of professional experience managing large-scale IT infrastructure, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) operations.
• Deep expertise in IT infrastructure domains including networking, data center operations, cloud platforms, and information security protocols.
• Proficient with container orchestration technologies like OpenShift and Kubernetes; continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools such as Jenkins or GitLab; configuration management systems including Ansible and Terraform.
• Thorough knowledge of regulatory compliance, data protection laws, and security standards applicable to IT infrastructure projects.