Lead DevOps and Platform Engineer

Lead DevOps and Platform Engineer

Vancouver, BC

Full Time on Site

Job Description:

Our Client a Vancouver Technology Company, Lead DevOps & Platform Engineer, you will establish and shape the technical foundation of their software development lifecycle — owning the evolution of our Azure platform and software-delivery foundation. This is a hands-on role for someone who can move comfortably between architecture,
implementation, incident response, security, automation, and technical leadership. You will inherit Azure-hosted products supported by six international developers and a flexible group of Canada-based contractors. Core capabilities, including Infrastructure as Code, centralized observability, mature GitHub-based CI/CD, and a sustainable production-support model, still need to be established.
 
Key Responsibilities:

Cloud Platform and Software Delivery:
 
• Implement industry-standard DevOps & Agile/SAFe Agile standards, tools, and governance
frameworks, and lead engineering teams in applying these best practices to the software
development lifecycle to meet business requirements and user needs.
• Own the architecture, reliability, security, performance, and cost management of the Microsoft
Azure platform across development, test, and production environments.
• Implement repeatable Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or Bicep, including reviewed
modules, environment separation, secure state, drift awareness, and controlled change
practices.
• Standardize GitHub Actions pipelines, repository governance, branch protections, reusable
workflows, release controls, and reliable rollback paths.
• Embed automated testing, code-quality checks, web application vulnerability scanning,
monitoring and remediation of CVEs/zero-day threats, secrets protection, and deployment
safeguards into the delivery lifecycle.
 
Reliability, Security, and Operations:
 
• Select and implement an observability stack from the ground up, covering logs, metrics, traces,
dashboards, actionable alerts, service ownership, and appropriate service-level objectives.
• Using Azure and Entra ID capabilities, establish and support secure cloud identity and access
management policies including secrets, network-security, conditional access policies, role-based
access, privileged identity management (PIM), and Azure Key Vault.
• Lead production incident response, blameless reviews, runbooks, and continual reliability
improvements. Critical incidents have historically been infrequent; initially, this role will be a
primary after-hours technical escalation point and will establish a more sustainable future
coverage model.
• Define and test recovery objectives, disaster-recovery procedures, and business-continuity
plans, while improving Azure cost visibility, budgets, alerts, and optimization.
• Contribute to the implementation and management of ITSM best practices using Jira Service
Management for Change, Incidents, Problem, and Service Requests.
 
AI-Enabled Engineering:
 
• Establish secure, approved AI-assisted development workflows across coding, testing, review,
documentation, infrastructure work, troubleshooting, and incident analysis, with human
validation for consequential changes.
• Create practical guardrails that protect proprietary source code, credentials, confidential
information, customer data, and regulated data when engineers use AI tools and agents.
• Partner with product and development teams to productionize AI-enabled services on Azure,
including repeatable environments, identity, secrets, evaluation and release gates, versioning,
rollback, monitoring, rate limits, consumption, and cost controls.
• Evaluate emerging AI platform and engineering tools based on measurable business value,
security, reliability, and cost rather than novelty, and use AI responsibly to reduce operational
toil.
 
Technical Leadership and Team Growth:
 
• Translate product priorities into architecture, technical plans, sequencing, estimates, and
delivery standards. Product leadership owns business outcomes and priority; this role owns the
technical approach and operational readiness.
• Coordinate technical implementation and execution of work by the broader development team
comprised of six international developers and rotating Canada-based contractors through
architecture and code reviews, mentoring, documentation, and clear engineering standards.
• Maintain various documentation; architecture diagrams, ITSM records, runbooks, operating
procedures, executive summaries of platform risks & investment requirements, progress
reports, communications, and presentations.
• Assess capability and capacity gaps, recommend the next-stage platform organization, and
participate in selecting, interviewing, and onboarding future hires.
 
 
Qualifications & Skills:
 
• Substantial hands-on experience, typically seven or more years, in DevOps, platform
engineering, Full Stack Development, UI/UX design processes, Scrum facilitation, site reliability
engineering, cloud infrastructure, and creation of a variety of digital products and service or
business-critical systems.
• Comprehensive knowledge of Agile/SAFe Agile principles and best practices used to manage
software development lifecycles and improve high quality digital products and services.
• Demonstrated ownership of production workloads in Microsoft Azure, with sound judgment
across architecture, networking, identity, security, resilience, performance, and cost.
• Deep experience building GitHub Actions pipelines and administering GitHub repository and
organization governance.
• Production experience with Terraform and/or Bicep and the engineering practices needed to
keep Infrastructure as Code safe, reviewable, reusable, and maintainable.
• Experience establishing monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, incident response, backup, and
disaster-recovery practices in an early-stage or immature environment.
• Strong cloud-security fundamentals, including Entra-based identity and access, secrets
management, network controls, vulnerability management, and secure software-supply-chain
practices.
• Professional experience supporting AI- or ML-enabled applications in production and using AIassisted
engineering tools or agents responsibly, including their security, privacy, observability,
evaluation, reliability, and cost considerations.
• Ability to automate operational work using PowerShell, Bash, Python, or another suitable
language.
• Demonstrated technical leadership across distributed teams with an ability to build positive
working relationships with contractors, or external partners, and clear written and verbal
communication skills suitable for technical and non-technical audiences.
• A degree, diploma, or certificate in computer science, engineering, or a related discipline, or an
equivalent combination of education and relevant professional experience.
 
Preferred Experience:
 
• Azure-hosted AI services, managed model APIs, retrieval or search components, AI gateways,
model or prompt evaluation, and LLMOps/MLOps practices.
• Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Datadog, or
comparable observability technologies.
• Building or scaling SaaS/PaaS products in a startup or growth-stage company.
• Healthcare, pharmacy, or another regulated environment, including implementation of technical
controls and evidence supporting PIPEDA, HIPAA, SOC 2 readiness, or comparable obligations.
• Docker and Kubernetes or AKS where orchestration is justified; Azure, cloud-security,
infrastructure, FinOps, or related certifications are also valued.
• Comprehensive experience working in an ITIL 4 IT Service Management environment.