Senior Manager, DevOps

POSITION DESCRIPTION:

Qcells is seeking a Senior Manager, DevOps to lead the DevOps function within our Operations and Platform Management organization and own the strategy, architecture, and operational execution of the DevOps foundation supporting our critical infrastructure energy management platform. 

This leader will be responsible for building and managing a high-performing DevOps team while establishing scalable, secure, and highly automated engineering practices across cloud and edge environments. The Senior Manager will define the organization's approach to GitOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, deployment automation, platform security, observability, and compliance. 

The ideal candidate combines strong people leadership and organizational management experience with deep technical expertise in modern DevOps and platform engineering. This individual will partner closely with Engineering, SRE, Security, Architecture, Product, and Operations teams to improve software delivery, platform reliability, security, and operational efficiency. 

Because Qcells operates critical energy infrastructure, this role requires experience building secure and resilient DevOps environments with strong governance, auditability, and compliance controls. 

This position is remote but preference will be give to San Francisco, Irvine and nearby candidates. Travel may be required up to 15%, depending on business needs. 

RESPONSIBILITIES: 

DevOps Leadership & Team Management 

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of DevOps and platform engineers responsible for supporting cloud and edge infrastructure. 

• Establish the DevOps strategy, operating model, technical roadmap, priorities, and engineering standards for the organization. 

• Build a high-performing engineering culture focused on automation, reliability, security, scalability, and continuous improvement. 

• Manage team capacity, resource planning, performance, career development, and technical skill development. 

• Partner with engineering and business leadership to align DevOps priorities with product roadmaps and organizational objectives. 

• Establish measurable DevOps KPIs and service-level metrics to evaluate deployment performance, reliability, quality, and operational efficiency. 

• Drive adoption of DevOps best practices across engineering teams through standards, documentation, governance, and training. 

CI/CD & GitOps 

• Own the architecture, implementation, and continuous improvement of enterprise CI/CD and GitOps capabilities. 

• Establish GitOps workflows for configuration management across multi-site data center, cloud, and edge deployments with comprehensive audit trails. 

• Lead the development of secure CI/CD pipelines for containerized applications targeting Azure cloud and edge Kubernetes environments. 

• Define enterprise standards for source control, branching, build automation, testing, artifact management, deployment, and release management. 

• Implement deployment strategies including canary releases, blue-green deployments, progressive delivery, and automated rollback. 

• Improve developer productivity and deployment velocity through standardized tooling, automation, and reusable platform capabilities.

Infrastructure Automation & Platform Engineering 

• Establish and govern infrastructure as code practices using Terraform, Ansible, or similar technologies. 

• Ensure infrastructure environments are reproducible, scalable, secure, and consistently managed across cloud and edge deployments. 

• Partner with Architecture and Engineering teams to design scalable platform capabilities supporting current and future product requirements. 

• Drive automation of provisioning, configuration management, environment management, and operational processes. 

• Establish standards for Kubernetes, container orchestration, artifact management, and application deployment across distributed environments. 

Security, Governance & Compliance 

• Partner with Security and Compliance teams to integrate security throughout the software development and deployment lifecycle. 

• Ensure CI/CD pipelines incorporate security controls including SAST, DAST, container scanning, vulnerability management, SBOM generation, and software supply-chain security. 

• Establish automated compliance validation, policy-as-code, and governance controls supporting NERC CIP, SOC 2, NIST, IEC 62443, and other applicable critical infrastructure standards. 

• Implement and govern secure practices for secrets management, certificate management and rotation, identity and access management, and zero-trust architectures. 

• Ensure DevOps processes provide appropriate traceability, auditability, segregation of duties, and change-management controls. 

Reliability, Observability & Operational Excellence 

• Establish observability standards across the DevOps ecosystem, including deployment metrics, build analytics, infrastructure health, failure tracking, and operational dashboards. 

• Partner closely with SRE and Engineering teams to improve platform availability, resilience, scalability, and recoverability. 

• Drive continuous improvement using operational metrics, incident trends, root-cause analysis, and engineering performance data. 

• Establish standards for disaster recovery, rollback, resilience testing, and failure recovery across cloud and edge environments. 

• Promote reliability engineering practices including automated testing, chaos engineering, capacity planning, and proactive risk mitigation. 

LEADERSHIP PROFILE: 

The successful candidate will be a hands-on technical leader and people manager who can operate effectively at both the strategic and technical levels. This individual should be capable of setting the long-term DevOps vision and roadmap while remaining technically engaged enough to challenge architecture decisions, identify risks, remove engineering roadblocks, and guide teams through complex platform and operational issues. 

The Senior Manager, DevOps will be expected to create an environment in which engineering teams can deliver software quickly, securely, reliably, and consistently while maintaining the governance and operational discipline required for critical energy infrastructure. 

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS: 

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience. 

• 10+ years of experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, SRE, Cloud Infrastructure, or related engineering disciplines. 

• 3+ years of experience directly managing DevOps, Platform Engineering, SRE, or infrastructure engineering teams. 

• Demonstrated success building, leading, and developing high-performing technical teams. 

• Strong technical background in enterprise-scale CI/CD, GitOps, infrastructure automation, cloud platforms, and container orchestration. 

• Expert knowledge of GitOps principles and technologies such as Argo CD, Flux, or similar platforms. 

• Extensive experience with CI/CD platforms such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins. 

• Deep experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration across cloud and distributed environments. 

• Strong experience with Microsoft Azure and cloud infrastructure architecture. 

• Expertise with infrastructure as code and configuration management technologies such as Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi, ARM, or Bicep. 

• Strong understanding of DevSecOps, vulnerability management, security scanning, software supply-chain security, SBOM, and SLSA practices. 

• Experience implementing compliance automation, policy-as-code, and security controls within regulated environments. 

• Experience establishing DevOps standards, governance, tooling, and processes across multiple engineering teams. 

• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, incident management, reliability engineering, and operational excellence. 

• Working knowledge of scripting and automation using Python, Bash, PowerShell, or similar languages. 

• Excellent leadership, communication, stakeholder management, and cross-functional collaboration skills. 

• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts and operational risks effectively to both technical teams and senior leadership. 

• Travel may be required up to 15%, depending on business needs. 

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: 

• Experience in the solar, renewable energy, energy storage, utility, or energy management industries. 

• Experience supporting critical infrastructure environments. 

• Experience with critical infrastructure compliance frameworks including NERC CIP, IEC 62443, and NIST. 

• Azure certifications such as Azure DevOps Engineer Expert, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or Azure Security Engineer Associate. 

• Knowledge of industrial control systems, SCADA environments, and industrial deployment requirements. 

• Experience with edge computing platforms and offline-capable or intermittently connected deployment environments. 

• Familiarity with industrial communication technologies and protocols including OPC-UA, MQTT, and industrial IoT architectures. 

• Experience with observability platforms including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or comparable technologies. 

• Understanding of data sovereignty, multi-tenant architectures, and geographically distributed infrastructure. 

• Experience implementing chaos engineering, resilience testing, and reliability engineering practices for mission-critical systems. 

• Knowledge of FedRAMP, StateRAMP, or other government security and compliance frameworks. 

COMPENSATION: 

In accordance with applicable pay transparency laws, the anticipated annual base salary for this position is: 

• Zone 1 (Bay Area, NYC): $209,800 – $262,200  

• Zone 2 (CA, NJ, NY): $190,700 – $238,400  

• Zone 3 (All others): $173,400 – $216,700 

The applicable salary range is based on the employee’s primary work location. Individual compensation will be determined based on qualifications, relevant experience, education, skills, internal equity, and other business-related factors.