Head of DevOps

The Head of DevOps is the leader of the entire DevOps department and oversees all activities of the junior teams. His duties are to oversee the day-to-day activities and to support the business’s site/software/applications platforms that service the entire business. The Head of DevOps is a demanding role that requires the occupant to be capable of leading cross-functional teams in a hands-on manner, diagnosing complex issues on the various platforms, and playing a leading role in software/platform/application architectural evolution.

The Head of DevOps has extensive programming experience and has served extensively the business’s sites/software/applications at a production and support capacity. The Head of DevOps demonstrates superior trouble shooting skills and has extensive knowledge in monitoring and alerting mechanisms.

Objectives and Responsibilities of the Head of DevOps

Leadership/Supervisory Role: His leadership position is the Head of DevOps’ most prominent role and in this position he oversees and guides all activities of the junior DevOps teams. The Head of DevOps leads the design, build, and operational management of highly secure and scalable sites/software for the business and works tirelessly to guarantee the reduction or removal of bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the DevOps department and engineering department as a whole.

As the leader of the DevOps department, the Head of DevOps promotes, documents, and implements systems infrastructure best practices, building tools that allow the department to develop and deploy impeccable sites/software. The Head of DevOps also creates tools that leverage productivity amplifiers such as code generators and schema repositories for scalable deployment.

Aspects of his leadership position will also encompass both quality assurance and continuous site/software testing. The Head of DevOps plays a mentorship role to key DevOps personnel, constantly promoting improvement in their professional skills and readying them for the occupation of his position in the future.

Design and Development/Strategy: The Head of DevOps will also play a strategic role where he will design and build infrastructure for sites/software, ensuring the highest levels of security and responding swiftly to any new and emerging vulnerabilities and security threats.

The Head of DevOps creates tools and automated workflow capabilities in order to enable the business’s software engineering teams to test and promote code across the engineering department. The Head of DevOps also builds, configures, and maintains the frameworks, tools, and systems that enable optimal performance of the business’s sites/software. He additionally leads the design and implementation of real-time monitoring systems of these sites/software.

Collaboration/Support: The role of the Head of DevOps as expected is a highly collaborative one. In his collaborative capacity, the Head of DevOps works hand-in-hand with the frontend and backend engineering teams in all technical operations and works to reduce or eliminate any repetitive or manual tasks.

In this collaboration, the Head of DevOps also provides hands-on support to the frontend and backend engineering teams by enabling the migration of site/software services throughout transition periods. The Head of DevOps also works with junior DevOps personnel in improving health and performance issues of the businesses sites/software systems.

He additionally collaborates with the quality assurance department in creating solution designs, capacity planning, and performance optimization. The Head of DevOps further works alongside senior engineering departmental leadership in deploying sites/software.

Other Duties: The Head of DevOps also performs similar duties as delegated by the Director IT operations, Chief Technology Officer, or the Employer.

Required Qualifications of the Head of DevOps

Education: The Head of DevOps has to have a master’ degree (Phd preferred) in Computer Science or any other relevant field. An equivalent of the same in working experience is also acceptable for this position.

Experience: A candidate for this position must have had at least 7 years of working experience in a DevOps capacity, working within a fast-paced and fast-evolving environment. He will also have had vast and successful experience leading a DevOps team.

The candidate will further have a demonstrated experience in enterprise network technologies as well as experience working in a large database operation environment. He will have had significant experience in service management practices and processes within a continuous delivery environment.

The candidate must similarly demonstrate vast experience writing code and have experience in the automation, configuration, and application performance management tools such as Ansible, NetBackup, and VMWare, NewRelic, and AppDynamics. The candidate must additionally demonstrate strong system-level troubleshooting skills and possess an ability to identify and resolve high-level scalability and performance issues.

He will have gathered experience in supporting scalable architectures and have vast experience supporting network protocols such as HTTP and DNS. A suitable candidate for this position will also demonstrate a superior and practical understanding of accepted DevOps principles.

Communication Skills: Communication skills are a must have for the Head of DevOps. This is especially so for his leadership position where he will be required to convey sensitive information and instructions to junior DevOps personnel, which will directly influence the performance of the entire department.

Communication skills will also be imperative for the Head of DevOps in his highly collaborative capacity where the clarity of his communications will determine how effectively cross-functional tasks are executed across the engineering department.

Technology/Software: The Head of DevOps must demonstrate extensive familiarity with technology and demonstrate exceptionally good computer skills. He will demonstrate skill working with PowerShell, Bash, Python, Java, Ruby softwares. He will further be adept in the use of Linux, Command Line, Git, Vagrant, and CI.

The Head of DevOps will also be highly capable of deploying sites/software with Puppet, Salt, Ansible, and so forth as well as hands on experience with tools such as Hadoop, Kafka, Mesos, Spark, Storm, Elasticsearch, and Cassandra. He will further be proficient in the workings of Cloud softwares and be highly experienced in monitoring systems such as Riemann, Sensu, Graphite, StatsD, among others. Finally, he must demonstrate knowledge in machine learning, big data, statistics, stream processing as well as experience building data processing systems.

Interpersonal Skills: Various interpersonal skills will also make the candidate even more suited for the position. He must be capable of handling multiple simultaneous projects and meet deadlines, have an ability to work in a group setting as well as in an independent position, be highly analytical by nature, be highly organized being able to effectively prioritize tasks, have exceptionally good problem solving skills, have an ability to work in a highly collaborative and fast-evolving environment, be highly adaptive and welcoming to change.

Leadership/People Skills: The Head of DevOps must have exceptional leadership skills and be a people person with an ability to develop strong, meaningful, and lasting relationships with others. He will be a likable, approachable, and relatable person who inspires trust in others who will then readily follow in his directives and trust in his insights.

JOB SKILLS REQUIRED FOR Head of DevOps
SYNONYMS AND VERY SIMILAR JOBS