Director, DevOps

Merkle is a leading data-driven, technology-enabled, global performance marketing agency that specializes in the delivery of unique, personalized customer experiences across platforms and devices. For more than 30 years, Fortune 1000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations have partnered with Merkle to maximize the value of their customer portfolios. The agency's heritage in data, technology, and analytics forms the foundation for its unmatched skills in understanding consumer insights that drive people-based marketing strategies. Its combined strengths in performance media, customer experience, customer relationship management, loyalty, and enterprise marketing technology drive improved marketing results and competitive advantage. With 5,500 employees, Merkle is headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, with 24 additional offices in the US and 25 offices in Europe and APAC. In 2016, the agency joined the Dentsu Aegis Network.

We are seeking a Director of DevOps who is passionate about DevOps, embraces infrastructure as code, supports CI/CD, and enjoys collaborating to produce high performing, maintainable solutions.  As a Director, you will be shaping the DevOps strategy and roadmap; leading and inspiring teams responsible for the successful release and run time of multiple revenue generating big data solutions; and continuously improving, optimizing, and eliminating toil through automation.  You will provide hands on guidance, coaching, and mentoring for your global teams as we build, evolve, and scale our solutions to meet our growing business.

Key Responsibilities:

• Evaluates, automates, and optimizes processes, building infrastructure through code and streamlining pipelines, monitoring, and incident response processes, following industry standards and best practices
• Manages a roadmap, working with stakeholders and leaders to manage priorities in alignment with business needs
• Evaluates, determines, obtains approval, and manages to a budget, including infrastructure, software, and cloud-based costs
• Provides hands on expertise, sharing real time guidance and offering hands on assistance in scripting, using tools, or coding as needed.
• Continuously strives for improvement, evaluating new approaches, industry standards, new tooling, etc. and producing recommendations for improvements
• Establishes SLAs, SLIs, SLOs, as well as establishes and monitors other metrics such as lead time for changes, change failure rate, deployment frequency, mean time to recover, and availability, striving for continuous operational improvement and improved customer satisfaction
• Collaborates with development, participating in designs and assisting with optimizing system performance, right sizing environments, and streamlining delivery
• Provides strong analytical, problem solving, and troubleshooting expertise and guidance

Maintains focus on meeting goals and delivering results while continuously improving

Required Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Mathematics, or other equivalent experience
• 8 years’ experience in leading teams
• 8 years’ experience in DevOps or Site Reliability
• 10 years or equivalent experience in supporting high availability systems
• 5 years’ experience in operations, including defining and implementing designs to support big data or large-scale systems
• 5 years’ experience in cloud base technologies (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• 3 years’ experience working in Agile teams and CI/CD environments
• Experience in monitoring platforms such as DataDog, New Relic, etc. and/or CloudWatch for operational monitoring
• Experience with scripting
• Experience with Linux; experience with Windows is desired
• Experience with containers such as Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
• Experience with Terraform or CloudFormation or other IaC tools
• Experience with Jenkins, Airflow, or other orchestration tools
• Experience with code repositories such as Git, Bitbucket, Github, etc.
• Experience in SQL

Soft Skills:

• Strong leader who motivates and inspires while instilling accountability and results
• Able to collaborate across organizations with all levels of leadership to develop plans, strategies, and establish priorities
• Able to communicate complex topics with ease and simplicity such that agreement or approval is obtained
• Able to learn new emerging technologies quickly and apply innovative ideas to resolve problems
• Able to perform under pressure and optimize team to attain a business goal or meet a need

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.
 

Merkle fosters a diverse environment that encourages original thinking about our business and empowers us to communicate with a global world of customers. We embrace differences of opinion and diversity of thought as they help us challenge and refine our solutions. Merkle, as a best-in-class marketing agency, welcomes big ideas, and believes they can come from anywhere. 

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