DevOps Team Lead at Datassential

United States

$165k - $185k

Who we are Datassential is a global food and beverage intelligence platform. By embracing billions of data points and AI, we offer a suite of innovative solutions that empower over 90% of the largest global brands in the food & beverage ecosystem to more effectively develop, market, and sell their products. Datassential, headquartered in Chicago, USA, has gained momentum in global markets through its acquisition of CHD Expert (HQ: France) in 2022. Datassential recently received investment from New Mountain Capital and Endicott Capital, two top tier private equity firms. This significant milestone in our company’s journey enables us to accelerate our product roadmap and enhance our R&D efforts to deliver even more value-added features and solutions for our clients.  Our global, remote-first team celebrates diverse backgrounds and new perspectives while cultivating expertise in all things food and beverage. Food brings people together, and there's room for everyone at Datassential's table. The DevOps Team lead reports to the Sr. Director, DevOps & IT. It is a hands-on technical lead position with no direct people-management responsibilities. The position is responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure that powers Datassential’s applications and data platforms. We focus on automation, reliability, and scalability to ensure our systems remain secure, efficient, and resilient. From managing CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure to improving monitoring, security, and cost efficiency, we work closely with development teams to streamline deployments and optimize performance. Our goal is to provide a strong, stable foundation that allows our engineering teams to deliver high-quality products quickly and reliably. What you will do:  * Build, manage, and enhance automated CI/CD pipelines on Buildkite (with legacy Jenkins/JTE pipelines still in service during our ongoing migration) and AWS and GCP-based infrastructure to deploy and run Datassential's applications efficiently and reliably. * Implement and manage cloud infrastructure using Terraform to ensure consistency, security, and scalability across environments. * Collaborate closely with development teams to understand requirements, design effective infrastructure solutions, and troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues. * Own uptime management and platform observability — proactively monitoring system performance, managing alerting through New Relic and Datadog, and driving security and compliance posture with tools like Snyk, SonarCloud, and Intruder.io. * Partner with other senior engineers on the team to provide collaboration and guidance on design, architecture, implementation, pipeline development, infrastructure, and security. * Help organize the team's day-to-day operations — running standups, sprint planning, backlog grooming, and retrospectives — and coordinate workload delegation across the team. * Own the health of our Jira boards: shepherd ticket lifecycle, ensure work is properly scoped and prioritized, and keep things moving without letting tickets go stale. * Represent DevOps in stakeholder meetings — capturing infrastructure and platform requirements upstream and communicating DevOps considerations, trade-offs, and constraints back to stakeholders. * Champion best practices and contribute to architectural direction as we transition toward a Platform Engineering model. Why you should join us:  * Gain hands-on experience managing cutting-edge cloud infrastructure across AWS (with a growing GCP footprint), ECS, Terraform, and modern CI/CD with Buildkite. * Work in a team that values innovation and experimentation. AI is a major focus across the company — not only do we actively use AI dev assistants to boost engineering productivity, we're also building a growing portfolio of AI-powered products and initiatives, giving you the chance to develop with AI and build on AI. * Play a key role in major technology initiatives, including the transition toward a Platform Engineering model and ongoing efforts to improve security and efficiency across the organization. * Advance your technical skills and career growth in a supportive environment that encourages continuous learning, mentorship, and exploration of emerging technologies. * Collaborate closely with talented developers and data teams, gaining broad exposure to application architectures, data workflows, and business operations. Who You Are:  * Passionate about automation, infrastructure reliability, and building efficient, scalable systems. * A natural coordinator who can keep work flowing across people and Jira boards without becoming the bottleneck. * Comfortable representing DevOps to stakeholders — translating technical realities into business-relevant terms, and pushing back constructively when requirements need refinement. * Detail-oriented, with strong troubleshooting skills and the ability to quickly diagnose complex technical issues. * A collaborative team player who communicates clearly and proactively, and who lifts up other senior engineers through guidance and partnership rather than gatekeeping. * An AI enthusiast — eager to integrate AI dev assistants into your workflow, try new tooling, and stay current as the space evolves. * Adaptable, self-driven, and comfortable working independently, taking initiative to propose and implement improvements. * Curious and eager to learn new technologies, tools, and practices, consistently looking to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. What you bring: Required: * 8–12 years of experience in DevOps, with extensive hands-on experience managing AWS cloud infrastructure (GCP exposure is a plus given our growing footprint there). * Expert-level proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform). * Strong experience with modern CI/CD pipeline tooling — Buildkite (YAML pipelines) preferred given our active migration; familiarity with Jenkins/JTE/Groovy is also valuable as we wind that down. * Comfortable deploying, managing, and operating containerized workloads on AWS ECS. * Solid Linux administration skills, including troubleshooting via CLI and scripting (Bash, Python). * Experienced with secure networking concepts, including AWS networking services, protocols, routing, and network security best practices. * Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability platforms (New Relic, Datadog, or equivalents), including configuring effective alerting, dashboards, and incident response workflows — this role owns uptime management for the platform. * Demonstrated experience coordinating technical work across a team — including running agile ceremonies (standups, sprint planning, grooming) and managing work through Jira. Nice to Have: * Experience with security and compliance tools (Snyk, SonarCloud, Intruder.io, Vanta). * Experience managing AWS IAM (policies, roles, permissions); familiarity with JumpCloud (or a comparable IdP) and federating AWS SSO via SCIM is a strong plus. * Experience integrating Atlassian tools (Jira/Confluence/Bitbucket) into CI/CD workflows. * Experience supporting ML workloads and MLOps pipelines (e.g., AWS SageMaker, related data pipelines). * Hands-on experience with AI developer tools (e.g., AI coding assistants) and a track record of integrating them into engineering workflows to lift team productivity. * Previous experience using AWS Serverless services (Lambda, Serverless RDS, API Gateway, etc.). * Working knowledge of Kubernetes. * Fresh Ideas! Compensation & Eligibility: This role is open to candidates currently residing in and authorized to work in the United States. Final offer will be determined by several factors including experience, skills, interview performance, location etc. Salary base range for this role will be $165,000 – $185,000 USD/year. US Benefits * Competitive salary plus eligibility for a performance-linked annual bonus plan. * Affordable Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance, including a no cost employee-only plan * Paid parental leave. * 401K with dollar-for-dollar company match up to 5%. * Unlimited PTO, recharge days, and Christmas through New Year break. * 100% business travel reimbursement. * Wellness Reimbursement or HQ Gym access. * Remote stipend for 100% remote roles. Our Table Welcomes All. We embrace diversity of both background and thought and foster an inclusive environment that extends an open landscape of opportunities to everyone. We invite each of us to simply be ourselves. We operate with respect and without judgment, celebrating both the power of the individual as well as our shared humanity. If you require reasonable accommodation to complete a job application, pre-employment testing, or a job interview or to otherwise participate in the hiring process, please contact careers@datassential.com. Datassential is an equal opportunity and E-Verify employer