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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Director of DevOps - **Company:** Exostar LLC - **Location:** Herndon, VA, United States - **Experience:** Expert - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Software as a Service, Continuous Integration, DevOps, Disaster Recovery, Public Key Infrastructure, Large Language Models, Mttr, Kubernetes, Bicep, Terraform - **Published:** June 11, 2026 - **Apply:** https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=4384d149216758db ## About the Role Do you have experience in Terraform?, Do you have a Bachelor's degree?, * 10+ years running production technical operations for a customer-facing SaaS business with hard uptime SLAs. * 5+ years leading multi-disciplinary teams of 25+ across DevOps/SRE and IT. * Deep, hands-on technical depth: cloud (AWS and/or Azure), Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Bicep), CI/CD, observability stacks, secrets and identity. This is not a role for a manager who lost their technical edge five years ago. * Demonstrated bias toward automation over headcount - with specific examples of toil eliminated, deploy frequency increased, or incident volume reduced through engineering. * Track record of using AI in production: LLM-based assistants, agentic workflows, AI-driven observability - not just experimenting with it. * Strong financial fluency: built and defended a multi-million-dollar infrastructure budget, owned COGS, partnered with a CFO/Finance organization on unit economics. * Demonstrated success partnering with Customer Support, Customer Success, or equivalent functions on joint operating models, incident handoffs, and shared customer-experience metrics. * Strong customer-facing presence: composed on a Sev-1 bridge with a CISO and credible in a QBR with a Fortune 100 customer. * Excellent written and verbal communication. This person writes the postmortem, briefs senior leadership, and explains the COGS variance - clearly. * Process discipline and detail orientation: reads the runbook, audits the dashboard, and notices the inconsistency. * Experience operating in regulated environments - SOC 2, NIST 800-171, ITAR, CMMC, or FedRAMP. * U.S. Citizens only- Due to customer requirements, U.S. Citizenship is required. Ability to gain and maintain Trusted Role is required Preferred Qualifications: You are exactly who we are looking for if you: * Direct experience standing up an AIOps program or deploying AI agents inside a production operations function. * Experience in defense supply chain, aerospace, or other regulated industries. * Familiarity with FedRAMP Moderate, CMMC Level 2, and NIST 800-53 / 800-171 Rev 2 control families. * Experience with PKI, HSMs, and identity-bound infrastructure. * Career arc that includes both "build" (engineering org) and "run" (operations org) leadership. Education * Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline. * Advanced degree preferred. ## Description The Director of DevOps sets the strategy and runs the day-to-day for Exostar's global, 24x7 production operations. The role is the technical and operational backbone for every customer-impacting issue: it owns the engineering response that Customer Support depends on, partners closely with Support on customer outcomes, and is the single accountable leader on the engineering side of every Sev-1/Sev-2. This is a highly visible role in a fast-growing, fast-moving company - every dollar of cloud and tooling spend gets reported up through this leader, and every step we take toward an AI-native operations posture is driven from this seat. The successful candidate is an automation-first technologist, a cross-organizational operator who is equally credible with engineering, product, security, support, and finance, and a process-minded leader who treats manual toil as a defect and uses AI as the default tool to eliminate it. Responsibilities: Your day if you join us: 24x7 Operations & Customer Issue Response * Own production uptime, performance, and reliability across all Exostar SaaS products on a 24x7 basis, including SLO definition, on-call rotation, incident command, and stakeholder communications during major incidents. * Own the engineering and operational response to every customer-impacting issue. Partner with Customer Support on triage, root cause, communications, and resolution - Support owns the customer relationship; this role owns the technical fix and the systemic prevention. * Drive blameless postmortems and ensure every Sev-1/Sev-2 results in a durable engineering or process fix - not a "we'll watch for it next time." * Be the single accountable engineering leader when a customer asks "what happened, and what are you doing about it." Automation-First Operating Model * Treat manual operational work as a defect. Set and enforce a target for the percentage of operational toil eliminated each quarter. * Drive infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, automated remediation, and self-healing patterns across the production estate. * Build a deployment platform that lets engineering teams ship safely and frequently without DevOps as a bottleneck. * Own CI/CD pipeline strategy, golden paths, and the developer experience for shipping to production. AI-Native Operations * Stand up and continuously evolve an AIOps practice: AI-driven anomaly detection, log summarization, intelligent alerting, and agentic incident triage. * Deploy AI agents to draft runbooks, post first-pass postmortems, and accelerate engineering investigation of customer-reported issues. * Mine operational and incident data with AI for recurring failure modes and capacity drift and turn those into engineering bets. Cross-Organizational Leadership * Operate as a peer to engineering, product, security, customer support, and finance leaders. This role lives at the intersection of those functions and has to be effective in all of them. * Partner with Customer Support on the joint operating model: incident handoffs, ticket-to-engineering workflows, status communications, and shared metrics for customer experience during issues. * Partner with Product Management and Finance on launch-readiness, capacity planning, and pricing/COGS modeling for new and existing services. * Partner with the Security Office on compliance, audit readiness, and secure-by-default infrastructure (SOC 2, NIST 800-171, CMMC, FedRAMP-adjacent). * Represent Operations in customer escalations, audit conversations, and revenue-impacting deals. COGS Management & Financial Reporting * Own the cost-of-goods line for Exostar's hosted services. Forecast, track, and explain it monthly to Finance and senior leadership. * Drive cloud cost optimization (commitments, right-sizing, idle elimination, architectural efficiency) as an ongoing discipline, not an annual project. * Build the unit-economics views Finance needs to run the business: cost per customer, per product, per environment. * Own vendor relationships and contracts for infrastructure, observability, and managed services; lead RFPs and renewals. Process & Operational Rigor * Stand up and maintain the operating cadence: weekly ops reviews, monthly business reviews, quarterly capacity planning, incident review boards (jointly with Customer Support and Engineering leadership). * Define and report KPIs and KRIs the CTO and CFO can use to run the business: availability, MTTR, deploy frequency, COGS per unit, automation coverage, and engineering-side metrics on customer-impacting issues. * Maintain the system of record for production inventory, dependencies, and configuration. * Own the disaster recovery and business continuity program - including the drills, not just the plans. Team Leadership * Lead, coach, and grow the DevOps team. * Build a culture where engineers default to automation and the whole team takes pride in customer outcomes - even when the customer relationship is held by a partner team. * Hire for automation instinct, technical depth, and cross-functional collaboration. Performance-manage against an automation and AI-leverage bar, not headcount growth. ## Related Videos - [What Developers Get Wrong About Application Quality](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/233-what-developers-get-wrong-about-application-quality) - [Back(end) to the Future: Embracing the continuous Evolution of Infrastructure and Code](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/440-back-end-to-the-future-embracing-the-continuous-evolution-of-infrastructure-and-code) - [From DevOps to Scaled DevOps: How We’re Rebuilding Continuous Delivery as a Platform](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/100018-from-devops-to-scaled-devops-how-we-re-rebuilding-continuous-delivery-as-a-platform) - [Shipping Faster with Less: Render on Cloud Hosting, AI Workloads, and the Future of DevOps](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1894-shipping-faster-with-less-render-on-cloud-hosting-ai-workloads-and-the-future-of-devops) - [Agentic DevOps: How AI-Powered Automation Transforms Software Delivery on GitHub and Azure](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1539-agentic-devops-how-ai-powered-automation-transforms-software-delivery-on-github-and-azure) - [DevOps Maturity Check – a way to balance autonomy and alignment](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/58-devops-maturity-check-a-way-to-balance-autonomy-and-alignment) ## Related Articles - [Navigating the AI Shift](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/629-navigating-the-ai-shift) - [From Prototype to Production: Build AI Agents with This Free 4-Course Learning Path](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/655-from-prototype-to-production-build-ai-agents-with-this-free-4-course-learning-path) - [Now is the time for industrialized software development](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/601-now-is-the-time-for-industrialized-software-development) - [Highest Paying Tech Companies for Developers](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/220-highest-paying-tech-companies-for-developers) - [Stephan Gillich - Bringing AI Everywhere](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/489-stephan-gillich-bringing-ai-everywhere) - [MLOps And AI Driven Development](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/magazine/82-mlops-and-ai-driven-development)