Director, DevOps Engineering

M3 (www.m3as.com) is a leading provider of hospitality-specific software solutions, delivering cloud-based tools for hotel accounting, financial reporting, labor management, payroll, and business intelligence. Built by hoteliers for hoteliers, M3 empowers hotel owners, operators, and management companies to streamline back-office operations, reduce costs, gain real-time insights, and drive portfolio performance across thousands of properties in North America and beyond.

Description Summary:

The Director of DevOps Engineering owns the organization's CI/CD pipeline architecture end-to-end, with primary accountability for embedding automated security controls into every stage of the pipeline (DevSecOps), building and operating ephemeral development and test environments, and leading release management and deployment strategy — including progressive delivery patterns such as Blue/Green and Canary deployments — for production releases. The individual must be capable of leading a technical team in a hands-on manner, partnering closely with Security, Engineering, and QA on release readiness, and driving the long-term pipeline, environment, and deployment roadmap in support of fast, safe, and repeatable software delivery.

Essential Duties:

The duties listed below are the essential functions of this position, and they may change as the needs of the company demand. All associates are expected to do what is necessary to get the work done and to cooperate fully with their supervisor’s requests for additional or altered duties.

• Supervises all roles assigned to the DevOps Engineering department, personally or through subordinate leads, including recruiting, training and development, performance management, motivation, corrective action, or termination in conjunction with HR if necessary.
• Owns the architecture, design, and continuous maturity of the organization’s CI/CD pipelines end-to-end, standardizing pipeline tooling and patterns (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins) across engineering teams to enable fast, reliable, and repeatable software delivery.
• Leads adoption of DevSecOps practices by embedding automated security checks directly into CI/CD pipelines, including static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), software composition analysis (SCA)/dependency scanning, container and image scanning, secrets detection, and infrastructure-as-code policy checks.
• Partners with the security team to define pipeline gating criteria, vulnerability severity thresholds, and remediation SLAs; implements policy-as-code in the pipeline to enforce security and compliance requirements defined by the Cloud Infrastructure Director and Security at build and deploy time.
• Designs, builds, and operates ephemeral environment infrastructure that provisions on-demand, short-lived environments per branch or pull request, enabling engineers to validate changes under production-like conditions without manual environment requests.
• Owns automation for the ephemeral environment lifecycle, including provisioning, data seeding and masking, teardown, and cost controls to prevent unused environments from accumulating spend, operating within capacity guardrails established by the Cloud Infrastructure Director and consulting that role before changes likely to materially shift baseline Azure spend.
• Owns release management for the organization, including release cadence and calendaring, versioning strategy, release train coordination across engineering teams, and change approval gates for production releases.
• Defines and leads the organization’s deployment strategy, implementing progressive delivery patterns such as Blue/Green and Canary deployments, automated rollback, and metrics-based promotion criteria to reduce release risk.
• Evaluates and introduces deployment and progressive-delivery tooling (e.g., Argo Rollouts, Flagger, service mesh or load-balancer-based traffic shifting, feature-flag platforms) to support safe, incremental rollout of changes.
• Owns workload-level orchestration and deployment routing within Kubernetes clusters; consults the Cloud Infrastructure Director on any change affecting cluster-level networking, ingress, or the underlying load balancer/VNet.
• Maintains infrastructure-as-code and automation practices in support of pipeline, environment, and deployment tooling, conforming to IaC standards and module conventions set by the Cloud Infrastructure Director rather than maintaining a separate convention, and escalating pipeline-specific needs into that standard.
• Establishes KPIs for pipeline reliability, deployment frequency, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (DORA metrics); drives continuous improvement through metrics, feedback loops, and formal retrospectives for release- and deployment-caused incidents, following the same RCA/AAR rigor used for infrastructure incidents.
• Participates in joint incident triage with the Cloud Infrastructure Director per the shared decision tree, with both Directors paged simultaneously on production degradation; co-authors joint RCA/AAR, reviewed by the VP, for any incident where both release and infrastructure signals were present.
• Builds, leads, and mentors a high-performing team of DevOps engineers; establishes clear career paths, skill development plans, and performance expectations; fosters a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Promotes cross-functional collaboration between DevOps, Security, Development, and QA teams on release readiness, deployment safety, and incident learnings.
• Other duties as assigned.

Education/Training/Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience) required.
• 5-8 years of experience in DevOps, Release Engineering, or Software Engineering required.
• 5+ years in leadership roles managing engineering or DevOps teams required.
• Proven experience building and scaling CI/CD pipeline architecture and release processes required.
• Deep experience required with:
  • CI/CD pipelines and tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins)
  • DevSecOps tooling, including SAST/DAST/SCA platforms (e.g., Snyk, Checkmarx, SonarQube), container/image scanning (e.g., Trivy, Aqua, Prisma Cloud), and secrets detection
  • Policy-as-code frameworks (e.g., Open Policy Agent/Conftest) for automated security and compliance gating
  • Ephemeral environment provisioning patterns (e.g., namespace-per-PR, environment-as-code, Terraform workspaces)
  • Progressive delivery and deployment strategy, including Blue/Green and Canary deployments, automated rollback, and feature-flag platforms (e.g., LaunchDarkly)
  • Deployment and traffic-shifting tooling (e.g., Argo Rollouts, Flagger, service mesh or load-balancer-based routing)
  • Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP)

Strong understanding required of:

• Release management practices, including versioning strategy, release cadence, and change management/approval workflows
• DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) and their use in driving continuous improvement
• Observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry) as they relate to deployment health and rollback triggers, contributed as part of a single shared observability platform maintained jointly with the Cloud Infrastructure Director and ratified by the VP, rather than a separate deployment-only stack
• Experience embedding security checks directly into CI/CD pipelines and partnering with security teams on vulnerability remediation SLAs preferred.
• Strong strategic thinking with the ability to translate vision into execution required.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders required.
• Proven ability to lead through change and drive adoption of new technologies and practices required.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities required.
• Experience managing multiple initiatives in fast-paced environments required.
• Cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, GCP) preferred.
• Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, CKS) preferred.
• DevSecOps-related certifications (e.g., Certified DevSecOps Professional, HashiCorp Terraform Associate) preferred.