Staff DevOps Engineer, Developer Experience (DevEx)

Demandbase is a pipeline AI platform that helps go-to-market teams automate growth and execute account-based strategies. The Staff DevOps Engineer will set the technical direction for the Developer Experience team’s platforms, tooling, and workflows, leading internal developer platform strategy, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, reliability, security, observability, and FinOps initiatives across the engineering organization.

Responsibilities:

• Set and drive the technical roadmap for the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) - not just execute against one handed to you
• Author and review RFCs/design docs that other teams adopt; act as architecture reviewer for infrastructureimpacting changes org-wide
• Serve as the escalation point for the highest-severity production incidents involving platform infrastructure; lead retrospectives and turn findings into structural fixes, not one-off patches
• Mentor senior and staff-level engineers across teams, raising the technical bar for platform engineering, reliability, and secure software delivery org-wide
• Own and evolve Demandbase's Internal Developer Platform (Backstage service/API/group catalog, goldenpath scaffolder templates, cicd-components ) as a product - measured by adoption, time-to-first-deploy, and reduction in platform-support toil
• Partner with software, data, security, and product engineering leadership to identify systemic friction across the SDLC and resolve it through automation and platform abstraction rather than one-off fixes
• Define what "good" looks like for AI-assisted development workflows across the org - evaluate, pilot, and roll out coding-agent tooling with the right guardrails
• Own the architecture of CI/CD orchestration (GitLab CI/CD, shared cicd-components ) supporting high release velocity, strong security guardrails, and local-to-production parity across the engineering org
• Drive standardization of build, test, and deployment patterns across application and data workloads at scale
• Own GitOps-based deployment strategy and evolve it as the org's service count grows
• Own the architecture and lifecycle of multi-cluster Kubernetes platforms across environments (EKS, and GKE where applicable) - upgrades, node lifecycle (Karpenter), networking, and security posture at fleet scale
• Own multi-account cloud IAM, networking, and security architecture; set the guardrails other teams build against
• Drive Infrastructure-as-Code strategy (Terraform, Crossplane) for consistency and security across accounts, not just individual environments
• Own service mesh (Istio) architecture across multi-cluster environments, including sidecar injection strategy and traffic policy
• Own core platform components - GitOps tooling, secrets management, service mesh - as production systems
• Own observability platform strategy (Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana/Loki) - what's collected, indexed, and actionable - balancing signal quality against cost
• Own FinOps practice for platform infrastructure - cost visibility, unit economics, and waste reduction - as a standing responsibility
• Define and evolve org-wide SLIs/SLOs and incident response practices; lead blameless postmortem culture at the organizational level

Requirements:

• 10+ years of overall engineering experience, including meaningful hands-on software development (Go, Python, or Java) and 7+ years building and operating cloud infrastructure at scale
• Demonstrated track record operating as a technical leader across multiple teams - driving cross-team RFCs, architecture decisions, or platform strategy
• Deep, hands-on experience designing and operating multi-account, multi-cluster Kubernetes platforms in production (EKS and/or GKE) at meaningful scale (dozens+ of services/clusters)
• Strong proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Crossplane) and GitOps practices (Flux or Argo CD) applied at organizational scale
• Deep experience designing and owning CI/CD systems supporting high release velocity and strong security guardrails (GitLab CI/CD preferred)
• Hands-on experience with service mesh (Istio) in multi-cluster environments, including security/traffic policy
• Strong experience building and owning observability platforms (Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana, Loki/Mimir/Thanos) with a cost-aware lens
• Working knowledge of container/supply-chain security practices (image scanning, hardened base images, vulnerability remediation)
• Experience owning or meaningfully contributing to cloud cost governance/FinOps practice
• Fluency with AI-assisted/agentic development tooling (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent) and informed opinions on safe, effective rollout at organizational scale
• Solid understanding of SLIs/SLOs, alerting strategy, and incident response, with experience leading (not just participating in) blameless postmortems
• Excellent written and verbal communication - staff-level influence runs through docs and reviews as much as code
• Experience supporting data pipeline/batch platforms (Airflow, EMR, Dataproc) is a plus