Lead DevOps Engineer

Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship. Local candidates will receive first consideration. C2C arrangements are not available for this role.

Lead DevOps Engineer

Location: Schaumburg , Illinois (hybrid; usually max of 3 days a week onsite)

Type: Full-time, direct hire

About the role

Our client, a fast-growing technology company, is hiring a Lead DevOps Engineer to own the AWS infrastructure behind its multi-region platform. This is a hands-on builder's role. You will write CloudFormation and, ideally, Node.js every day (but can look at folks who don't know Node.js), but must have AWS, CloudFormation, and have led infrastructure projects from design through production, and guide a small team of engineers.

You will work closely with engineering, security and product teams to keep the platform reliable, secure, scalable and cost-efficient as it grows. Your decisions will shape the architecture, and you will also write the code that carries it out.

What you'll do

• Design, build and maintain AWS infrastructure with CloudFormation as the primary Infrastructure-as-Code tool.
• Own AWS environments for high availability, scalability, failover and security across multiple regions.
• Build and maintain Node.js tools and services for automation, deployment workflows, monitoring and platform operations.
• Design and run CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application deployments.
• Set up and manage logging, monitoring and alerting across AWS environments.
• Lead infrastructure upgrades with minimal downtime.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues across infrastructure, applications and pipelines.
• Improve performance, reliability, security posture and cloud cost efficiency.
• Lead infrastructure projects and mentor engineers on the team.
• Keep clear documentation of infrastructure, automation and operational processes.

What you bring

• 10+ years in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, site reliability or systems engineering.
• 2 years of Lead experience (Open to hands on managers!!)
• Extensive real-world CloudFormation experience: authoring and maintaining complex templates, managing stacks across environments, and handling updates, rollbacks, drift detection and the full stack lifecycle.
• Expert, hands-on AWS experience across EC2, Lambda, IAM, VPC, S3, CloudWatch, RDS, CodeBuild and Elastic Beanstalk.
• A strong track record designing and operating CI/CD pipelines.
• Would love to find hands-on, production experience with Node.js code: services, automation or internal tools you built, or even Node.js apps you deployed.
• Experience debugging systems and applications in production, including database performance tuning.
• A solid grasp of AWS security: IAM, networking, encryption and least-privilege access.
• Strong Linux systems experience.
• U.S. citizenship or permanent residency (green card). Visa sponsorship is not available.

Nice to have

• Experience leading or mentoring engineers on infrastructure projects.
• Experience running multi-region or globally distributed AWS environments.
• Containers on ECS or EKS.
• Cloud cost optimization or FinOps experience.
• A background in fast-growing, high-scale engineering teams.