Lead DevOps Engineer

About SDL: 

SDL provides cloud-based software solutions to local governments, aiming to make our communities better places to live and work. As a mission-driven company, SDL is committed to creating impactful technology that serves the public good. 

We are looking for team members who take pride in their work and seek to consistently improve themselves, their skills, and their knowledge. If this sounds like you–and the type of work environment where you’d thrive–we hope you’ll join us!

We offer flexible remote work options and are primarily based in the US East Coast time zone. You do not have to relocate to join SDL!

What We Offer:

• Competitive salary.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Flexible working hours and remote work options.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Professional development opportunities and learning budget.
• Home office and IT budget.
• Supportive team environment.
• The chance to work on innovative projects with cutting-edge technologies.

About the Role

We are seeking a highly skilled Lead DevOps Engineer to own and scale our cloud infrastructure across GCP, and Azure, enabling our engineering teams to deliver software faster, safer, and more reliably. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in a multi-cloud environment, loves automation, and can mentor other engineers while building world-class infrastructure.

As the Lead DevOps Engineer, you will design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines, build Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions, optimize system performance, and lead efforts around observability, security, and reliability. You will be a key partner to engineering leadership, driving our DevOps strategy and building a culture of automation, scalability, and operational excellence.

Key Responsibilities:

Cloud Architecture & Operations

• Design, implement, and manage scalable, secure, and cost-optimized infrastructure in GCP, and Azure.
• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) for consistent, repeatable deployments.
• Lead multi-cloud strategy, ensuring workloads are secure, and resilient.
• Own and optimize CI/CD pipelines for speed, reliability, and security (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, or similar).
• Champion an automation-first approach, reducing manual intervention in builds, deployments, and scaling.

Observability & Reliability

• Introduce and maintain logging, monitoring, and alerting (New Relic, Datadog, ELK etc.).
• Lead incident response, postmortems, and root cause analysis to improve system resilience.

Security & Compliance

• Integrate security into every layer (identity, secrets management, patching, vulnerability scanning).
• Ensure compliance with SOC 2 or other regulatory requirements as applicable.

Collaboration & Leadership

• Mentor DevOps and software engineers, providing technical guidance and best practices.
• Partner with product, engineering, and leadership to align infrastructure initiatives with business goals.
• Evaluate and introduce emerging DevOps tools and practices to keep the organization on the cutting edge.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or Infrastructure Engineering roles.
• Proven hands-on experience with two major cloud platforms (GCP, Azure)
• Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM, CloudFormation).
• Strong background with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Helm).
• Proficiency with CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or CircleCI).
• Experience with monitoring/observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, New Relic).
• Knowledge of networking, lo