Lead DevOps Engineer

Sphera is a leading global provider of enterprise software and services that enables companies to manage and optimize their environmental, health, safety and sustainability. Our mission is to create a safer, more sustainable and productive world.

Sphera is a portfolio company of Blackstone, a U.S.-based alternative asset investment company that focuses on private equity, technology and innovation, and more. Blackstone businesses succeed through strong partnerships, a personalized approach and a commitment to exceptional performance with uncompromising integrity. Sphera and Blackstone are leaders in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) space.

We are guided by our core values of Customer Centricity, Accountability, Bias to Action, Innovation, and Collaboration. These values help us recruit the right talent to join our rapidly expanding team of around the globe. It is important to us that each and every Spherion is not only eager to challenge themselves and knows how to get work done but is an awesome addition to our company culture.
Lead DevOps Engineer Job Description

As the Lead DevOps Engineer, you will be a key technical leader responsible for the reliability, scalability, and automation that power all of the products our team supports across the Sphera Cloud SaaS platform, with a particular focus on our core platform and our AI initiatives. From designing and maintaining the automation behind our cloud-based deployments, to enabling auto-scaling and safe, one-click rollbacks, to building and securing the CI/CD pipelines that make our engineering teams faster, you will make a meaningful, day-to-day impact on the business. You will also lead the buildout and operation of the infrastructure that supports our AI and data workloads, and partner closely with our Engineering and Security teams on the network and firewall changes that keep our environments secure and compliant.
Key Responsibilities

- Provide technical leadership for DevOps and platform engineering across all of the products the team supports, prioritizing our core platform and AI initiatives.

- Own and continuously improve our CI/CD pipelines, including integrated code-quality and security scanning with SonarCloud and Black Duck.

- Configure and enforce permissions across repositories and pipelines so that scans run reliably and that access, approval, and enforcement controls are correctly applied.

- Design, build, and maintain the automation that powers cloud-based deployments, including auto-scaling, progressive delivery (blue/green and canary), and reliable, one-click rollback.

- Implement and manage infrastructure primarily as code with Terraform, using the Azure CLI for emergency and ad-hoc operations.

- Build, deploy, and manage workloads using Docker on Azure Container Apps, as well as Azure Web Apps and Function Apps.

- Own and operate key platform resources, including Azure API Management, Elasticsearch, and Databricks, ensuring they are reliable, secure, performant, and cost-efficient.

- Build and operate the infrastructure and pipelines that support our AI, machine learning, and data workloads, covering model and data-pipeline deployment, serving, and monitoring (MLOps).

- Partner daily with our Engineering and Security teams on network and firewall rule change requests, ensuring changes are well-documented, reviewed, and compliant.

- Develop and evolve self-service platform capabilities and internal developer tooling (“golden paths”) that improve developer velocity, consistency, and safety across teams.

- Perform and automate system administration, including provisioning, configuration, maintenance, and disaster recovery.

- Work with our NOC team to build observability into the platform (metrics, logs, traces, and alerting) to ensure performance and reliability, and to monitor the behavior, quality, and cost of AI and data workloads in production.

- Embed security and compliance into pipelines and infrastructure (DevSecOps),