Senior Specialist, DevOps

Position Overview

The Senior Specialist, DevOps heads the Group DevOps function, offering expert guidance to DevOps Engineers who support development, deployment, and operation across various technology stacks for in-house solutions. Reporting to the Group Senior Manager, Enterprise Systems, this role oversees the Group's software delivery infrastructure including source control, CI/CD pipelines, build and release automation, environment and infrastructure provisioning, and platform observability. It defines and enforces DevOps standards and practices consistently adopted by internal development teams. Collaboration with the Cybersecurity Specialist ensures platform security throughout the delivery lifecycle, including secrets management, vulnerability and dependency management, access control, and deployment security. Additionally, the role champions the responsible use of AI-assisted coding and automation tools by defining governance policies, review protocols, and evaluation benchmarks. The Senior Specialist also guides DevOps Engineers, partners with application, infrastructure, and security teams, and manages vendor relations for tooling and platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership to DevOps Engineers, steering direction, harmonizing efforts across multiple projects, and mentoring on engineering practices.
• Develop and enforce Group-wide DevOps standards, reusable pipeline templates, environment configurations, and comprehensive engineering documentation to ensure uniform adoption.
• Coordinate with development, infrastructure, and security teams to align on intake, prioritization, and service delivery goals, leveraging technical authority for influence.
• Monitor and report platform performance, delivery throughput, and continuous improvement progress to senior leadership.
• Oversee vendor relationships for DevOps tools and cloud platforms, managing licenses, service quality, and costs effectively.
• Manage end-to-end CI/CD pipelines encompassing source control, branching strategy, automated builds, integrated testing, artifact management, and release processes.
• Enhance deployment robustness through repeatable, automated releases featuring versioning, rollback capabilities, and change traceability across all environments.
• Automate environment and infrastructure provisioning through infrastructure-as-code and configuration management to minimize manual interventions and prevent environment drift.
• Support diverse application technology stacks—web, database, integration, and containerized workloads—with reusable pipeline patterns for development teams.
• Reduce lead time from code commit to production deployment while ensuring high-quality changes by collaborating on test automation and quality gates.
• Establish observability frameworks including logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerting for full visibility of service health and application behavior.
• Set and monitor availability and performance objectives with solution owners; report performance against these targets.
• Lead incident management for platform and deployment disruptions, including coverage planning, escalation, root-cause analysis, and preventative measures.
• Ensure backup, recovery, and business continuity protocols are established and validated for platform components and deployment tooling.
• Manage the capacity, cost, and lifecycle of cloud and on-premises platform resources.
• Incorporate security within delivery processes such as secrets management, dependency and container scanning, application security testing, and remediation tracking.
• Implement and uphold access control policies including least privilege and segregation of duties across repositories, pipelines, and environments.
• Ensure platform configurations, patching, and hardening comply with IT security policies and regulatory standards.
• Collaborate with information security teams on vulnerability management, penetration tests, and security incident responses affecting the delivery platform.
• Lead responsible integration of AI-assisted coding and automation tools, setting approved software, usage boundaries, and data governance.
• Define review and quality protocols for AI-generated code, addressing requirements like human oversight, testing, licensing, and intellectual property compliance.
• Evaluate and pilot AI-assisted engineering tools, assessing impacts on productivity and quality prior to broad implementation.
• Develop capabilities through training sessions, documentation, and guidance to ensure safe, consistent use of AI-assisted tools across teams.

Required Skills and Experience

• At least 8 years’ combined experience in software engineering, infrastructure, or platform engineering roles, including a minimum of 3 years focused on DevOps or platform support within internal application development.
• Proven ability to lead engineers technically through influence rather than direct management, including mentoring and capability building.
• Hands-on expertise designing and operating complete CI/CD pipelines (examples: Azure DevOps, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) featuring automated build, test integration, artifact control, and release automation.
• Experience supporting applications using multiple technology stacks and deployments across cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP) and on-premises environments.
• Demonstrated implementation of platform security controls in the delivery cycle, including secrets management, vulnerability scanning, access control enforcement, and system hardening.
• Skill in establishing observability and monitoring setups (such as Azure Monitor, Grafana, Prometheus, ELK) and managing incident and problem resolution for platform services.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools (like Terraform, Bicep/ARM, Ansible) and container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) is advantageous.
• Experience introducing AI-assisted coding or automation tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) with governance and adoption support is preferred.
• Background working with regional or global IT headquarters within multinational corporations is beneficial.
• Prior involvement in manufacturing or industrial sectors, including ERP or operational systems integration, is a plus.

Educational Qualifications and Certifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related fields.
• Cloud certifications are advantageous, such as Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, Azure Administrator/Solutions Architect, or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer.
• Container platform certifications (e.g., Certified Kubernetes Administrator or Developer) and security credentials (CompTIA Security+, Microsoft SC-series, CSSLP) are pluses.
• ITIL Foundation or equivalent service management certifications are valued.
• Fluent communication in English is required; Mandarin language skills are beneficial due to operations in China.

Competencies

• Strong fundamentals in CI/CD, release engineering, and build automation across various tech stacks.
• Advanced proficiency with infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, containerization, and orchestration technologies.
• Knowledgeable of cloud and on-premises platform design, networking, identity, and access management impacting application deployments.
• Clear understanding of secure software delivery best practices including secrets management, vulnerability handling, and platform hardening.
• Experienced with observability tooling and automation scripting languages such as PowerShell, Bash, and Python.
• Well-informed about AI-assisted coding toolsets, their appropriate implementation, and associated risks.
• Exemplifies a leadership style that empowers engineers by setting engineering quality standards and fostering adoption without formal authority.
• Effective communicator capable of explaining complex technical trade-offs to varied stakeholders and managing multiple competing priorities.
• Exhibition of continuous improvement mindset favoring automation and comprehensive documentation over manual processes.