WHAT DOES A LEAD DEVOPS ENGINEER DO?

Published: Jan 13, 2026 - The Lead DevOps Engineer manages global system deployments using AWS, Linux, and Terraform while maintaining reliable CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure. This role supports system architecture, compliance, automation, and operational stability through effective tooling and level 2/3 support. The lead also contributes to testing, documentation, and cross-functional activities, including sales and deployment support.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Lead DevOps Engineer

1. Lead DevOps Engineer Duties

  • High Availability: Manage, maintain, upgrade and monitor the infrastructure in a highly available environment to achieve an SLA of 99.99 percent availability
  • CI/CD: Develop, build and maintain continuous integration and deployment pipelines
  • Cloud Deployment: Deploy and manage cloud infrastructure to serve business needs
  • Cost Optimization: Optimize performance and cost in a highly available environment
  • Platform Automation: Simplify and automate the provisioning of the platform to support the engineering team's requirements and needs
  • System Architecture: Work closely with the system engineering team to design and architect the platform
  • System Maintenance: Perform maintenance and system upgrades including patches, hotfixes, configuration updates and backups, to keep resources current and secure
  • AMI Management: Employ multiple patching strategies and patch and build new AMIs for cloud-aware applications

2. Lead DevOps Engineer Details

  • DevOps Enablement: Help MHC Software teams adopt and improve DevOps methods and practices that lead to successful software delivery
  • Infrastructure Automation: Design and implement infrastructure and automation solutions for development, testing and production environments
  • Monitoring Automation: Build and deploy automation, monitoring and analysis solutions
  • Best Practices: Implement industry best practices
  • Service Reliability: Own availability and reliability of mission-critical services
  • Engineering Culture: Encourage an experimental and fail-fast mindset
  • Release Collaboration: Collaborate with engineering to plan and deploy releases and patches
  • KPI Tracking: Create and track DevOps KPIs

3. Lead DevOps Engineer Responsibilities

  • Software Optimization: Recommend software improvements to achieve higher availability, scalability and efficiency
  • Cloud Architecture: Design, build and deliver cloud computing solutions, hosted services and underlying software infrastructure
  • System Operations: Manage and run application servers, web servers, databases, batch jobs, file transfers and monitoring tools
  • Security Compliance: Support InfoSec scans and compliance audits
  • System Reliability: Support and troubleshoot scalability, high availability, performance, monitoring, backup and restore activities across environments
  • Cost Optimization: Lead cloud cost optimization efforts
  • Technology Adoption: Keep up to date on modern technologies and advocate their inclusion within products and solutions
  • Multi Cloud: Manage solutions in AWS and Azure

4. Lead DevOps Engineer Accountabilities

  • DevOps Strategy: Take ownership of Groundspeed DevOps strategy and practices
  • Project Planning: Define projects of various sizes with detailed plans and coordinate individuals to execute those plans
  • Cloud Solutions: Work with customers and internal stakeholders to design and build cloud native systems and solutions
  • Infrastructure Reliability: Ensure the secure and reliable operation of all Groundspeed infrastructure across multiple environments
  • Production Support: Work with engineering teams to deploy new systems and services and help support them in production
  • Operational Visibility: Provide visibility into operational performance and status through monitoring and incident management tools
  • CI/CD Ownership: Own and improve the CI/CD pipeline and other developer tools
  • Software Development: Write reliable, scalable and maintainable software primarily in Python
  • Technical Mentorship: Participate in code reviews and provide mentorship in a variety of areas to other team members

5. Lead DevOps Engineer Functions

  • Global Deployment: Manage deployments, configuration and updates of camera systems around the world
  • AWS Infrastructure: Maintain multiple AWS cloud environments using Terraform
  • System Provisioning: Provision camera systems using AWS and Linux and configure and connect them to the cloud network
  • Device Management: Provision Google devices for image review activities
  • Compliance Management: Manage information systems compliance and audit activities
  • System Architecture: Contribute to system architecture design and documentation
  • Production Support: Support real-world deployments of solutions with level 2 and 3 support
  • Sales Support: Support sales activities including proposals and reports
  • Automation Scripting: Develop scripts and tools for effective system maintenance and operations support
  • CI/CD Management: Maintain CI/CD using Bitbucket Pipelines and Deployments
  • System Testing: Perform ad hoc system testing
  • Technical Documentation: Contribute to technical product user and internal documentation
Relevant Information
What Does A DevOps Engineer Do?