Knox Systems is looking for a Director of DevOps to define and execute our enterprise DevOps, cloud platform, and automation strategy. This role provides technical and organizational leadership across Platform Engineering, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), observability, reliability, and compliance automation for our regulated cloud environments. You will ensure our platforms are secure, scalable, auditable, and cost-efficient, enabling engineering teams to deliver software rapidly while meeting FedRAMP and NIST 800-53 requirements.

What You'll Do

Define and own Knox’s DevOps and Platform Engineering strategy, roadmap, and operating model.
Build, lead, and scale a multi-disciplinary organization of DevOps Managers, Platform Engineers, and SREs.
Establish clear ownership models, career paths, performance standards, and succession planning.
Champion a DevSecOps culture focused on automation, reliability, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Serve as the executive escalation point for platform reliability, deployment risk, and operational maturity.
Set architectural direction for multi-cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP) using Infrastructure as Code.
Define enterprise standards for networking, IAM, encryption, key management, configuration baselines, environment consistency, Policy-as-Code and GitOps workflows.
Ensure platform designs and automation meet FedRAMP Moderate/High requirements and NIST 800-53 controls.
Evaluate and approve new platform tooling and cloud services.
Own the enterprise CI/CD strategy supporting multiple product and engineering teams.
Standardize pipelines with reusable frameworks, integrated security scanning, and compliance validation.
Enable self-service deployment models that balance velocity with governance.
Define and track DORA metrics, deployment success rates, and release reliability KPIs.
Partner with Engineering leadership to continuously improve developer productivity and release cadence.
Establish organization-wide standards for observability, SRE practices, and reliability engineering.
Ensure systems are instrumented with metrics, logs, and traces aligned to defined SLIs and SLOs.
Partner with NOC and Security teams to improve detection, alerting, and incident response.
Lead post-incident reviews and drive systemic improvements through automation and design changes.
Partner with Security and Compliance leadership to embed compliance-as-code across platforms and pipelines.
Own DevOps and platform responsibilities for Continuous Monitoring (ConMon), evidence automation and audit readiness, secure secrets, identity, and access management.
Ensure platform documentation, runbooks, and policies meet FedRAMP and 3PAO expectations.
Act as a technical leader during audits and compliance reviews.
Establish FinOps practices across cloud environments, integrating cost controls into automation.
Ensure consistent tagging, usage tracking, and cost attribution.
Provide executive-level reporting on cloud spend, optimization opportunities, and ROI.
Balance performance, reliability, and cost efficiency in platform decisions.
Serve as the primary Platform/DevOps representative in architecture review boards, change management, release readiness and risk assessments.
Communicate platform health, risks, and progress to senior leadership.
Partner with Product, Engineering, Security, and Operations leaders to align priorities and execution.

What We're Looking For

10+ years in DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Cloud Infrastructure roles.
5+ years leading senior engineers and/or managers in complex environments.
Proven experience operating multi-cloud platforms in regulated industries.
Deep expertise in IaC, CI/CD, GitOps, and cloud-native architectures.
Strong working knowledge of FedRAMP and NIST 800-53 control implementation.
Exceptional leadership, communication, and executive presentation skills.
U.S. citizenship (dual citizenship not permitted).

Nice to Have

AWS DevOps Engineer – Professional, Azure Solutions Architect, Terraform Professional, CISSP, or ITIL v4 certification.

Technical Stack

Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation
GitOps & CI/CD: ArgoCD, Flux, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Spacelift
Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE), Helm, Service Mesh (Istio, App Mesh)
Observability: Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Prometheus
Security: CrowdStrike, Vault, KMS, Azure Key Vault, Keeper
Compliance Frameworks: FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, SOC 2, ISO 27001

Team & Environment

You will build and lead a multi-disciplinary organization of DevOps Managers, Platform Engineers, and SREs. This role reports to the VP of Engineering or CTO. Work is high-impact and purpose-driven at Knox. Problems are high-stakes, expectations are high, and results are visible. Speed, rigor, and trust matter. Your contributions will be visible, your expertise relied upon, and your impact immediate and measurable.