DevOps Manager

Position Description

Manager, DevOps

Position summary

The Manager, DevOps is a member of the NWEA Product Engineering group (PE), a high-functioning team of creative, collaborative, motivated and professional individuals driven by the singular mission of partnering to help all kids learn.

The Manager, DevOps is a high-level leadership position with expectations for both technical leadership, and a force to grow and sustain NWEA’s positive, high energy technology company culture.  This position provides technical leadership to our DevOps team and across teams within NWEA.  The individual is very deep in a particular technology stack and is recognized outside the company as an industry expert.  The Manager, DevOps works on the forefront of his/her area of expertise, ensuring that NWEA intelligently adopts new technology. 

The Manager, DevOps leads a team of hands-on engineers who support the creation and availability of high-quality craftsmanship-level software for NWEA clients and internal users. The Manager, DevOps may be called upon to fulfill functions related to systems engineering and development that are not specifically engineering-related, such as requirements gathering, producing documentation, mentoring staff and leading projects. This position provides technical direction and professional/career development for all DevOps Engineers. 

Responsibilities

• Leads DevOps staff on the design, implementation, and maintenance of enterprise systems.
• Oversees DevOps staff and manages the prioritization of team's deliverables. Takes full responsibility to ensure every employee has a clear understanding of how success will be measured at all times.
• Works with Product Operations and Development leadership to craft and maintain standards and guidelines for configuration management, Linux system security and build pipeline functionality.
• Sets standards and guidelines for tools, processes, technologies, methodologies, etc. used by the DevOps team to develop and deliver solutions

• Conduct capacity planning for build automation systems and development environments, analyzing growth patterns and predicting future trends and needs based on data and statistics.
• Lead the evaluation, selection and deployment of new technologies and tools
• Work with project managers, department heads and team members to determine project approaches, parameters and priorities
• Work with colleagues to optimize overall system performance. This includes working with applications, network, storage, database and server technology
• Maintains current awareness of latest trends in technology stack specialty
  • Understands appropriate use of those technologies in the organization
  • Leads the adoption of those technologies as appropriate
• Represents the organization in professional societies and groups by presenting NWEA’s innovations and uses of technology
• Provide accurate time estimates for DevOps team tasks
• Participate in creating standards and ensuring team members adhere to standards, such as security standards, coding frameworks, languages, etc.
• Manage staff assignments and responsibilities to ensure work is addressed in a timely fashion.
• Lead Incident response processes for DevOps team
• Work with Operations leadership as well as Procurement and Budget personnel to nsure that all budgetary items are planned and implemented appropriately.
• Perform other duties as assigned to ensure the success of the team and the entire organization             

Skills and abilities

• Develop talent: develop people to meet both their career goals and the organization's goal
• Manage conflict: handle conflict situations effectively, with a minimum of noise
• Communicate effectively: develop and deliver multi-mode communications that convey a clear understanding of the unique needs of different audiences
• Collaborate: build partnerships and work collaboratively with others to meet shared objectives
• Customer focus: build strong customer relationships and deliver customer-centric solutions
• Plan and align: plan and prioritize work to meet commitments aligned with organizational goals
• Drive results: consistently achieve results, even under tough circumstances
• Instill trust: gain the confidence and trust of others through honesty, integrity, and authenticity
• Direct work: provide direction, delegation, and remove obstacles to get work done
• Build effective teams: build strong-identity teams that apply diverse skills and perspectives to achieve common goals
• Ability to solve complex problems and issues
• Ability to think strategically and then to develop and execute plans to implement the strategies
• Ability to communicate technical information to a broad, potentially non-technical audience
• Ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions
• Expert level analytical abilities, diagnostic skills and technical aptitude
• Demonstrated expertise in team management of 8 or more technical professionals
• Demonstrated ability to work with a wide variety of individuals, in a highly collaborative, complex and changing environment
• Ability to assess the effectiveness of processes and procedures and lead improvement efforts include documenting and implementing
• Must be able to perform the physical and intellectual requirements of the role, with or without accommodation

Education and experience

• Minimum bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field; or an equivalent combination of education and experience will be considered in lieu of a degree
• Minimum 3 years related management experience, with at least 2 years’ experience in Technology Operations Management supporting a software development environment.
• Experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment
• Experience with AWS systems management
• Experience with budget and capacity management
• Experience with the following is a plus: Puppet, Hiera, GIT, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Foreman, Jenkins, Terraform, DynamoDB, AWS account provisioning, JIRA/Atlassian suite
• Experience in 24x7 high availability production and incident response processes

Administrative Use: