Director, Platform DevOps & DevEx

Company Description

VERSANT is a leading force in news, sports and entertainment - home to iconic and trusted brands that inspire, inform, and delight audiences. Our unique combination of content, technology and services enriches the cultural fabric, igniting passions, sparking conversations, and connecting people to what they love most.

As an independent, publicly traded company, VERSANT brings together powerhouse cable networks - including USA Network, CNBC, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC), Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Golf Channel - with dynamic digital and direct-to-consumer brands such as Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow, GolfPass, and SportsEngine. Together, these businesses reflect our commitment to delivering exceptional experiences across every screen and service.

VERSANT is an industry-changing media company fueled by innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit. With a strong foundation and a forward-looking vision, VERSANT empowers creativity, embraces change, and drives connection in an ever-evolving world.

Job Description

The Director, DevOps and DevEx is a senior technology lead responsible for designing, building, and continuously evolving the CI/CD platform, cloud-native infrastructure, and automation ecosystem. This role focuses on enabling fast, reliable, and secure software delivery while significantly improving developer and operational experience through automation, self-service, and intelligent tooling.

In this role, you will lead the strategy and execution of DevOps practices, integrating the latest AI-driven tools to automate workflows, reduce operational friction, and provide actionable insights across the software delivery lifecycle. You will partner closely with engineering, security, platform, and operations teams to embed reliability, scalability, and usability into every stage of development and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the architect for VERSANT’s DevOps and delivery platforms, defining the technical vision, reference architectures, and long-term roadmap for CI/CD and automation.
• Design and oversee the implementation of enterprise CI/CD architectures, ensuring scalability, resilience, security, and consistency across teams and products.
• Architect cloud-native and container-based platforms, establishing standards for Kubernetes, serverless, hybrid infrastructure, networking, and runtime environments.
• Define and govern automation frameworks, including the strategic use of AI-powered tools to improve build, test, deployment, observability, and incident response workflows.
• Set architectural standards for infrastructure as code, pipeline design, environment promotion, and deployment strategies.
• Embed DevSecOps principles into platform architecture through automated security scanning, policy enforcement, and compliance-by-design controls.
• Architect and guide the implementation of observability and reliability platforms, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and AI-assisted anomaly detection.
• Review and approve platform designs, pipeline changes, and automation approaches, ensuring alignment with architectural standards and best practices.
• Provide architectural guidance and technical mentorship to DevOps, platform, and application engineering teams.
• Partner with engineering, security, and infrastructure leadership to align platform architecture with business, reliability, and scale requirements.
• Remain hands-on where necessary to validate designs, prototype solutions, and resolve complex technical challenges.
• Drive continuous evolution of the DevOps platform architecture based on emerging technologies, industry trends, and organizational needs.

Qualifications

• BA degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, or Infrastructure Architecture roles.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a lead or principal architect for CI/CD platforms, DevOps tooling, or large-scale delivery ecosystems.
• Deep hands-on expertise designing and operating CI/CD architectures using modern tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Argo CD, etc.).
• Advanced experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, and/or Azure) and cloud-native architectures, including Kubernetes and serverless technologies.
• Strong background in infrastructure as code and configuration management (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi).
• Proven ability to architect DevSecOps pipelines, integrating automated testing, security scanning, policy enforcement, and compliance controls.
• Experience designing observability platforms, including metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and reliability dashboards.
• Demonstrated success driving platform standards and architectural de