Director - Platform Engineering & Development Operations

Own, evolve, and operate the platform that powers FORTNA’s mission-critical software.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will personally design, build, and operate RHEL and OpenShift/Kubernetes platforms, establish a secure and scalable GitOps delivery model, and measurably improve reliability, deployment velocity, and recovery outcomes for Tier-1 services.

You will set a high operational bar—automated, auditable, and secure by default—while enforcing strong governance, including no direct developer access to production.

• Design, build, upgrade, and operate RHEL fleets and OpenShift/Kubernetes clusters across multiple environments and clusters.

• Own platform concerns end-to-end: networking, storage, identity, security policies, scaling, and HA/DR.

• Drive platform standardization through opinionated, well-documented golden paths.

• Architect and operate the paved path: GitHub Actions → Artifactory → Argo CD.

• Build reusable GitHub Actions workflows and runners; manage artifact immutability, retention, and provenance.

• Operate Argo CD at scale: app-of-apps, sync waves, health checks, drift remediation, and secrets.

• Enable progressive delivery patterns where appropriate.

• Design and run VMware and/or Nutanix estates, including HA clusters, templates/golden images, micro-segmentation, backup/restore, and capacity planning.

• Embed security by design into build and promotion pipelines, including SAST, DAST, secret scanning, image signing, SBOMs, and policy-as-code gates.

• Define and operationalize SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.

• Improve deployment frequency and MTTR.

• Lead incident response and drive blameless post-mortems.

• Own DR objectives and testing cadence.

• Enforce no-human-in-prod via RBAC, GitOps controls, and auditable break-glass procedures.

• Partner closely with Application Engineering, QA, Security, and Architecture.

• Lead, mentor, and grow Platform/DevOps/SRE engineers.

• Set quarterly OKRs and platform roadmaps.

• Drive adoption through reference architectures and enablement.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field; Master’s preferred.

• 10+ years in IT, with at least 5 years in platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE leadership.

• Linux: Recent, production-grade RHEL administration and operations.

• Containers/Orchestration: Operating OpenShift (or enterprise Kubernetes) in production: cluster upgrades, operators, networking/ingress, quotas/limits, security contexts, multi-cluster promotion.

• GitOps & CD: Operating Argo CD in production (app-of-apps, sync waves/health, drift detection, secrets management; progressive delivery with Argo Rollouts/Flagger or equivalent).

• CI & Artifacts: Building/owning GitHub Actions pipelines (reusable workflows, runners) and managing Artifactory (images/charts, immutability, SBOM/attestation, provenance/signing).

• Virtualization: Designing/supporting VMware and/or Nutanix environments (HA clusters, templates, storage/network design, backup/restore).

• Ops & Governance: Demonstrated no-dev-in-prod controls, incident leadership, SLO/error-budget practice, and DR testing.

Nice-to-Have

• AWS/EKS operations (VPC/subnets/NAT, IRSA/IAM, add-ons, KMS/Secrets Manager/SSM, cost guardrails).

• IaC at scale (Terraform/Ansible), OPA/Conftest, service mesh, Backstage developer portal.

• Observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK, Datadog/New Relic) and ITSM integration (ServiceNow/Jira).

• AI-assisted engineering (CodeQL, Copilot/ChatGPT) with guardrails.

Leadership Skills:

• Strong people management and team-building capabilities.

• Exceptional communication and stakeholder engagement skills.

• Ability to bridge technical and business objectives.

Why Join Us?

• Lead mission-critical platform and DevOps initiatives for a globally deployed enterprise solution.

• Work with cutting-edge infrastructure and application technologies.

• Influence the future state architecture and operational excellence of our systems.

• Collaborate with talented cross-functional teams in a high-impact environment.

This job description describes the general nature and level of work expected of a person assigned to this position. All job requirements listed indicate the minimum level of knowledge, skills and/or ability deemed necessary to perform the job proficiently. Employees may be required to perform any other job-related duties as requested by their supervisor.

It is the policy of FORTNA and its affiliated companies to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, citizenship status (if authorized to work in the U.S.), or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, FORTNA will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.