WHAT DOES A DEVOPS TEAM LEAD DO?

Published: Oct 23, 2024 - The DevOps Team Lead oversees junior DevOps activities and manages all server environments, from development to production. Ensures stable and automated environments through configuration management, infrastructure provisioning via Terraform, and containerization of microservices on Kubernetes. Collaborates on deployment strategies and maintains key initiatives with the Director of DevOps to support seamless continuous integration and delivery.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for DevOps Team Lead

1. DevOps Lead Duties

  • CI/CD Management: Manage and develop continuous integration and deployment solutions for production applications across various sites/software.
  • Platform Reliability: Manage availability, latency, scalability, and efficiency of the platform by engineering reliability into software and systems.
  • Capacity Planning: Participate in service capacity planning and demand forecasting, software performance analysis, and system tuning.
  • Training: Conduct training on junior DevOps engineers.
  • Infrastructure Leadership: Architecture and technical leadership of the entire DevOps infrastructure.
  • DevOps Model Design: Designing and implementing DevOps model and CI/CD infrastructure across different teams.
  • Automation: Working closely with Dev teams on automated deployment tasks.
  • Engineering Practices: Establishing engineering practices, including automated testing and monitoring.
  • Guideline Development: Producing the guideline for developers.
  • Infrastructure Maintenance: Maintaining CI/CD infrastructure, working environments.

2. DevOps Lead Details

  • Operations Management: Manage the e2e Operations of Production Services through the DevOps and NOC teams.
  • Monitoring: Ensure regular monitoring of processes and day-to-day job execution for smooth running of all Production / Staging / Development environments.
  • Operations Strategy: Active participation in operations strategy & implementation, driving quality and efficiency, including best practices & metrics for system operations.
  • Reporting: Assure proper tracking and reporting of all Enterprise IT systems, including system health reports, outage reports, L1, L2, predictive analysis, and management/operating summaries.
  • 24x7 Operations: Responsible for all 24x7x365 Level 1/2 Operations in a proactive manner (Deployments, Monitoring, Troubleshooting, SLA/OLA Management, Service Capacity Management, Service Incident Management, Service Problem Management, Licensing, etc.).
  • DevOps Tools: Implement DevOps tools and life cycle on responsible services.
  • Automation: Implement operational automation processes.
  • Code Transition: Enable successful DevOps (Agile Operations) by transitioning code from Dev/Test to Staging until Production.
  • Incident Management: Function as the escalation point for every P1 Incident across production operations.
  • Incident Handling: Ensure the DevOps teams adequately manage high and critical priority incidents in production.
  • Quality Assurance: Ensure high quality of solutions, security, performance, and operational requirements are met.
  • Mentorship: Mentor - provide guidance, training, and problem-solving support to team members.
  • Automation Opportunities: Identify opportunities for automation and architecture simplification.
  • Cloud Deployment: Deploy, automate, and maintain hybrid cloud-based solutions.
  • Technical Improvement: Improve the DevOps environment/team with technical initiatives.
  • IT Infrastructure: Manage IT infrastructure, including cloud solutions.

3. DevOps Lead Responsibilities

  • DevOps Analysis: Analyze and review current DevOps practices.
  • Process Improvement: Make recommendations on how to improve DevOps processes and tools across large enterprises.
  • Monitoring & Alerting: Create meaningful dashboards, logging, alerting, and responses to ensure issues are captured and addressed proactively.
  • Automation Tools: Contribute to enterprise-wide tools for automation.
  • Quality Control: Document, review, and ensure that all quality and change control standards are met.
  • Learning & Development: Participate in and lead learning activities around modern DevOps core practices (communities of practice).
  • Change Management: Maintain and implement change management control procedures and processes for production, UAT, and TE releases.
  • Technology Evaluation: Research and evaluate new technologies.
  • Team Guidance: Provide guidance to a team of DevOps engineers.
  • Stakeholder Negotiation: Negotiate priorities with Engineering and Product Management leadership teams.

4. DevOps Lead Accountabilities

  • Team Leadership: Lead a team of UC DevOps dealing with daily operational issues.
  • Platform Management: Manage day-to-day operations of the geographically distributed core Voice Platform.
  • Collaboration: Work with development teams on new designs and services.
  • Continuous Delivery: Contribute to the company strategy for continuous delivery.
  • Project Management: Handle project-based work, including software upgrades, centralized logging, automated monitoring, automated configuration management, load testing, and exploring alternative tools.
  • Change Management: Roll out major changes and provide Tier 2/3 support during maintenance windows.
  • HA & Failover Design: Develop and implement HA and failover designs.
  • DevOps Tools Management: Manage the DevOps tools deployed on-prem and on Kubernetes.
  • Pipeline Review: Review the current DevOps pipeline and provide/implement short- and long-term plans.
  • Monitoring Framework: Define the application monitoring, alerting, and reporting framework.
  • Solution Design: Collaborate with solution architects and application development leads to co-create robust and scalable application frameworks by providing best practices in design and coding.

5. DevOps Lead Functions

  • Department Leadership: Oversees and leads the activities of the junior DevOps departments.
  • Server Oversight: Oversight of all server environments, from Dev through Production.
  • Configuration Management: Automation and configuration management of the business's servers and provides stable environments for quality delivery.
  • Issue Resolution: Assist with day-to-day issue management.
  • Prototype Development: Implement proof of concept solutions in the form of prototype applications.
  • Containerization Leadership: Take lead in containerizing microservices and migrating them to the Kubernetes clusters.
  • Infrastructure Provisioning: Work on an infrastructure which is 100% on Amazon and provision it via Terraform code.
  • Deployment Strategy Development: Develop deployment strategies that allow DevOps engineers to successfully deploy code in any environment.
  • Technology Leadership: Spearheads the creation of new technology infrastructures and maintains configuration management and automation tools.
  • Automation Enablement: Enables the automation of configuration management of all environments, as well as the automation of continuous integration and continuous delivery.
  • Strategic Collaboration: Work closely with the Director of DevOps to maintain the health of various key initiatives/deliveries.