DescriptionAbout the Role
As a Staff DevOps Engineer, you'll own how code gets from commit to production at NinjaOne - designing and continuously improving the release and deployment pipelines that let engineering teams ship quickly, safely, and often. This role sits at the intersection of CI/CD, deployment automation, and Infrastructure as Code, and it's built for someone who thinks in modules, state files, and plan/apply workflows, not manual console changes.
Terraform is our IaC standard, and you'll be the architect behind it - building a cloud-agnostic foundation that scales across teams today and extends to a multi-cloud future (AWS now, Azure/GCP as we grow). You'll operate at both a strategic and hands-on level: setting deployment and IaC standards org-wide, mentoring engineers, and partnering closely with Development, QA, Security, and IT to keep our release process fast, secure, and resilient.
This is a high-ownership role for someone who wants to own the "last mile" of software delivery - turning builds into safe, repeatable production deployments backed by clean, modular infrastructure code - and who's excited to shape that strategy as we expand into new regions and cloud providers.
Location - We are flexible on remote working from home, if you are located in the USA and reside in one of the following states - CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, *IL, KS, MA, MD, ME, NJ, NC, NY, OH, OR, TN, TX, VA, and WA. We have physical offices in Austin, TX and Tampa, FL, if you prefer a hybrid option.
*Onsite interviews may be required for this role.
We hire the best software engineers, but experience in our stack can't hurt: NinjaOne is built on Java, Kotlin, C++, Golang and Postgres; supporting millions of user endpoints and running as a scalable cloud service in AWS. Knowing large-scale datastore bottlenecks, asynchronous application design and client-server architecture will help you.
What You'll be Doing
- Own the CD/Release Pipeline: Design, build, and continuously improve delivery pipelines - from artifact promotion through progressive rollout (blue/green, canary, rolling) to production, with automated health checks, gating, and rollback. Build the CI/CD framework with particular depth on the CD half: release orchestration, environment promotion, deployment gating, automated rollback. Automate release management across services and regions - deployment scheduling, change tracking, feature-flag-driven rollout, coordinated multi-service releases.
- Lead Terraform/IaC Strategy & Architecture: Serve as technical authority on the Terraform codebase: module design, remote state management (backends, locking), workspace/organization strategy, versioning, provider pinning, RBAC for infra changes, and secrets management - built to scale across dozens of teams without conflict. Define the cloud-agnostic architecture (abstraction layers, reusable module libraries, naming/tagging conventions) that lets this extend from AWS to Azure/GCP as the company grows multi-cloud.
- Establish Governance & Guardrails: Implement policy-as-code and automated compliance/security/cost scanning (Sentinel, OPA, Checkov, Infracost, or similar) directly into the Terraform pipeline so infra changes are safe, auditable, and cost-aware by default.
- Drive Org-Wide Adoption: Partner with every engineering team to migrate existing infrastructure onto the new Terraform architecture; build documentation, golden-path templates, and training so teams outside DevOps/Deployment Engineering can safely author their own IaC.
- Drive Cross-Cloud Infrastructure Delivery: Design, develop, and deploy secure, compliant infrastructure in AWS (current primary cloud) via Terraform, shaping module/architecture strategy so the standard extends cleanly to Azure/GCP as those environments come online.
- Monitor, Support, and Respond: Proactively monitor deployment pipelines, release health, Terraform plan/apply activity, and infra alerts/metrics. Serve as technical escalation point for production support, including after-hours. Own incident response, rollback, and remediation decisions for both deployment and infrastructure issues.
- Mentor the Team: Coach engineers on release engineering, deployment safety, Terraform best practices, and IaC code quality.
About You
- 10+ years cloud DevOps (AWS-primary), with strong emphasis on release engineering, deployment automation, and IaC.
- Multi-cloud production experience required - AWS plus hands-on, production-grade work in Azure and/or GCP (not theoretical portability).
- 4+ years hands-on, production-grade Terraform - module authoring, remote state (S3/DynamoDB), workspaces, provider version management, safe plan/apply in CI/CD.
- Deep CD experience (not just CI) - progressive rollout strategies, automated rollback, supporting infra as code.
- Proven enterprise-scale Terraform architecture experience - remote state design, module registries, versioning/governance policy, multi-team access control.
- Real multi-cloud IaC architecture experience - built/operated a cloud-agnostic architecture in production, not just designed portable-in-theory modules.
- Terraform ecosystem tooling (Terragrunt, Terraform Cloud/Enterprise, Atlantis, Sentinel/OPA, Checkov) - plus.
- Track record driving org-wide IaC adoption - migrations, golden-path templates, enabling other teams.
- Agile/version-control tooling: Jira, Confluence, Git, BitBucket.
- Deep CI/CD tooling expertise, with hands-on CircleCI experience strongly preferred; we're especially interested in candidates who've owned the CD/release side of the pipeline - including the provisioning layer - not just build/test automation.
- Expert in cloud ops - scalability, reliability, maintainability through full deployment lifecycle.
- Track record reducing lead time, change failure rate, time to recover.
- Ability to coach/mentor.
- 7+ years *nix (Linux, MacOS, BSD, AIX).
- 5+ years scripting (Shell, Go, Python, PERL, Tcl/Tk) for deployment tooling/Terraform providers.
- 5+ years monitoring/alerting/observability, including drift detection against Terraform state.
- Kubernetes/ECS experience (Helm, Kustomize) including cluster/node provisioning via Terraform - highly desirable.
