Title: Lead Azure Devops engineer
Duration: 12 Months
Location: (Remote)
Lead DevOps Engineer with experience mentoring and upskilling experience.Must be technically sound with TFS and ADO transformations to GitHub. Must be a savvy business communicator who can influence stakeholders and lead teams.
The candidate must have TFS (Team Foundation Server) to GitHub transformation experience.
The candidate must have ADO (Azure DevOps) to GitHub transformation experience, including wikis and dashboards
The candidate must be both technically sound as well as a savvy business communicator who can influence stakeholders and lead team.
Client is seeking a highly skilled Lead DevOps Engineer/Upskilling Partner with a strong background in both hands-on DevOps work and leadership. This role is key to driving automation, process improvements, and migrations within our organization, supporting Iowa schools and stakeholders through a large portfolio of data collection and reporting applications. As a key member of our team, you'll be instrumental in driving our DevOps initiatives and delivering secure, high-quality technical solutions to our customers. The ideal candidate will play a critical role in migrating applications from TFS/ADO to GitHub, establishing DevOps best practices, and mentoring developers. This position is for someone who excels in technical problem-solving and can guide teams through DevOps transformations
As the Lead DevOps Engineer/Upskilling Partner, you will:
Lead DevOps Strategy (60-70% hands-on, 30-40% leadership): You’ll balance hands-on work with leadership, focusing on automating CI/CD pipelines, establishing best practices, and leading development teams through migrations.
Application Migration: You will lead the migration of applications from TFS/ADO to GitHub. Experience with GitHub Actions, GitHub Enterprise, and Azure DevOps will be critical for success. You’ll design and implement migration strategies that include moving wikis, project management boards, and source code repositories.
DevOps Automation & Optimization: You’ll build scalable, automated solutions for builds, testing, and deployments, as well as optimize branching, merging, and release processes.
Mentorship & Technical Guidance: You will mentor and coach developers, leading technical debates, and providing guidance on best practices for development, security, and process automation.
Security and Code Quality: You will integrate security scanning tools into the development pipeline (e.g., SAST, SCA, GitHub Advanced Security) and lead efforts to improve code quality through automated tests, code reviews, and continuous integration practices.
Cloud and Infrastructure Support: While the primary focus will be on Azure, you should have experience with other cloud providers, infrastructure as code (IaC), and setting up and managing CI/CD pipelines from scratch.
Role Clarity and Team Structure:
The role is a mix of hands-on DevOps (60-70%) and leadership (30-40%). You will be expected to guide developers in adopting DevOps practices, review their code base, and provide guidance on improvements through pair programming or proof-of-concepts (POCs).
There is no dedicated DevOps team, so you will lead the effort by working closely with the development team to implement DevOps practices.
Cloud Focus and Infrastructure:
While this role is primarily focused on TFS and Azure (with Azure Pipelines already in use), experience with GitHub Actions and migrating pipelines from other tools is essential. You should also have strong hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, ARM templates), though infrastructure work will be more prominent later on in the role.
Key DevOps Initiatives:
You’ll be responsible for establishing new CI/CD pipelines and migrating teams from TFS/ADO to GitHub. The initial focus will be on setting up standards for automated processes and improving code quality and security. There is a clear need for integration of security tools (e.g., SonarQube, Dependabot, Snyk) and setting up GitHub repository security policies.