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
Editorial Process and Content Quality
This content is part of Lamwork's career intelligence platform and is developed using structured analysis of real-world job data, including publicly available job descriptions, skill requirements, and hiring patterns.
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Content is reviewed and updated periodically to reflect changes in skills, role requirements, and labor market trends.
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