Sr Director, DevOps & Automation

We believe in the power and joy of learning

At Cengage Group, our employees have a direct impact in helping students around the world discover the power and joy of learning. We are bonded by our shared purpose – driving innovation that helps millions of learners improve their lives and achieve their dreams through education.   

Our culture values inclusion, engagement, and discovery

Our business is driven by our strong culture, and we know that creating an inclusive workplace is absolutely essential to the success of our company and our learners, as well as our individual well-being. We recognize the value of diverse perspectives in everything we do, and strive to ensure employees of all levels and backgrounds feel empowered to voice their ideas and bring their authentic selves to work. We achieve these priorities through programs, benefits, and initiatives that are integrated into the fabric of how we work every day. To learn more, please see https://www.cengagegroup.com/about/inclusion-and-belonging/.   

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Sr. Director of DevOps & Automation to lead our enterprise-wide strategy for continuous integration, continuous delivery, platform automation, observability, and infrastructure as code. This role is key to enabling faster innovation, higher reliability, and cost efficiency across our engineering organization. You’ll lead a hard-working team of DevOps engineers, platform specialists, and SREs to architect scalable systems, implement automation across the SDLC, and embed modern DevOps principles across our product and engineering teams. You’ll also collaborate with Product, Security, Compliance, and Infrastructure to ensure high-performance, resilient, and secure delivery pipelines. This is a high-impact leadership position at the heart of our digital transformation.   

What You’ll Do

• Establish the DevOps Vision: Define and implement the enterprise DevOps and automation strategy aligned with our engineering and product goals.

• Lead Platform Enablement: Build and scale shared CI/CD and infrastructure automation platforms to drive consistency, speed, and reusability across product teams.

• Accelerate Delivery Velocity: Improve developer productivity by streamlining build, test, and deployment workflows with solid focus on automation and self-service tooling.

• Drive Reliability & Observability: Encourage the use of standard methodologies for monitoring, alerting, incident response, and site reliability engineering (SRE).

• Optimize Cloud Infrastructure: Collaborate with cloud engineering and finance teams to implement automation that optimizes resource usage and reduces cloud spend.

• Security & Compliance Automation: Partner with security and compliance to implement “shift-left” capabilities that embed security and regulatory controls into automated pipelines.

• Lead & Grow Talent: Recruit, develop, and retain a hard-working team of DevOps, automation, and SRE professionals.

• Promote DevOps Culture: Act as a leader with a point of view and change agent to encourage adoption of DevOps practices across all engineering teams. Create a strong culture of ownership, innovation, and collaboration.   

Skills & Experience We’re Looking For

• 10 years of progressive experience in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, or platform engineering, with at least 5 years in a leadership role

• Deep hands-on knowledge of modern DevOps practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure as code (IaC), containers (Docker, Kubernetes), observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana), and configuration management

• Experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure in large-scale production environments

• Track record of delivering measurable improvements in deployment frequency, mean time to recovery (MTTR), developer productivity, or infrastructure cost

• Solid understanding of agile product development and software delivery lifecycles

• Experience partnering with security and compliance teams to meet enterprise standards

• Strong executive communication skills with the ability to influence at all levels

• A collaborative approach with the ability to lead cross-functional initiatives in a matrixed organization

• Bonus: Experience implementing internal developer platforms or platform engineering models   

Position Value & Impact

This role will deliver:

• $1–3M in annualized infrastruc