DevOps Sr. Manager/Director - Kontxt

About the position

As a DevOps Sr. Manager/Director (exact job title will be based on experience and seniority), you will play a pivotal role in leading our DevOps team while ensuring seamless collaboration between operations, engineering, and customer teams. This position requires a balance of technical expertise and leadership skills to guide team members, manage customer relationships, and ensure efficient operations. You will oversee the deployment, scaling, and performance of RealNetworks cutting-edge software solutions and drive operational excellence across all aspects of the DevOps lifecycle. Preferred location for this hybrid position is in Seattle, Washington.

Responsibilities

• Define, build, and lead a DevOps organization that supports operational tasks.
• Manage, mentor, and develop a team of DevOps engineers, ensuring skill development and alignment with organizational goals.
• Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, and collaboration within the DevOps team.
• Oversee on-call rotations and ensure smooth incident management.
• Cloud architecture design, lead the process of building large apps using orchestration.
• Oversee the design, deployment, and scaling of infrastructure solutions using tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Kafka, and Cassandra.
• Manage high-availability environments leveraging technologies like Java/Scala, Python, AWS, Grafana, ELK Stack, Linux, and Oracle.
• Ensure best practices for CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, logging aggregation, and resource management.
• Manage support contracts (Redhat, ParkPlace Technologies).
• Interface with customer operations teams to ensure alignment on system performance and accessibility.
• Act as the primary point of contact for operational issues, fostering strong customer relationships and maintaining high service levels.
• Manage and resolve customer access issues in collaboration with IT and security teams.
• Manage trouble reporting processes, workflows, and improvements.
• Drive improvement of software development process via DevOps collaboration with other dev teams through tools, processes, and other efficiencies.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to achieve milestones and optimize service delivery.
• Lead efforts to implement scalable NoSQL architectures and deploy advanced big data frameworks like Spark.

Requirements

• Proven experience managing and leading DevOps and Operations teams in a high-availability environment.
• Strong technical expertise in configuration management, CI/CD, cloud architecture design and infrastructure scaling.
• Familiarity with modern DevOps tools and common microservice stacks (e.g. Kafka, Cassandra, Airflow, and AWS), and strong Linux background.
• Excellent customer relationship management and communication skills.
• Experience working with large customers directly in fast-paced, high-pressure setting.
• Ability to balance technical responsibilities with team management and strategic initiatives.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with large customers/telecom customers is a plus.
• Experience in resource optimization and cost management in cloud environments.
• Expertise in designing complex NoSQL solutions and Spark-based big data systems.
• Experience working with Data Science pipelines and ML applications.

Benefits

• Dynamic, flexible work environment.
• Good work/life balance.
• Participation in US Benefits Program.