Staff DevOps Engineer, IaC

NinjaOne provides a unified IT operations platform for endpoint management, patching, backup, and remote access. The Staff DevOps Engineer will own release and deployment pipelines, lead Terraform and Infrastructure as Code strategy, establish governance and security guardrails, and drive secure, scalable infrastructure delivery across cloud environments.

Responsibilities:

• 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
• Other duties as needed

Requirements:

• 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
• *Onsite interviews may be required for this role
• • 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
• • 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
• This position is NOT eligible for Visa sponsorship
• *Due to operational policies, NinjaOne is unable to hire for this role within the city limits of Chicago. We will consider all qualified candidates who reside outside of the city proper or are willing to self-relocate
• • 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
• • Kubernetes/ECS experience (Helm, Kustomize) including cluster/node provisioning via Terraform — highly desirable