Principal Devops Engineer Jobs in Ohio

INTRODUCTION

Principal DevOps Engineer Lead (Remote – U.S.) This can be contract-to-hire or full-time/perm. Our client is seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer Lead to serve as the primary owner of their cloud infrastructure, deployment strategy, and operational excellence initiatives. This is a highly hands-on individual contributor role for someone who has personally designed, built, scaled, and supported production AWS and Kubernetes environments. The successful candidate will own both strategic direction and day-to-day execution of DevOps initiatives, working alongside a software engineering and QA team while serving as the organization's primary DevOps decision-maker. This is not a role for someone who has primarily operated as one member of a large DevOps organization where architects or technical leads made infrastructure decisions. The ideal candidate has been the primary owner responsible for technical direction, implementation, production support, and operational outcomes.

ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own the organization's DevOps strategy, infrastructure roadmap, and operational direction
• Design, build, maintain, and optimize AWS-based infrastructure supporting production, development, and testing environments
• Lead a major EC2-to-EKS migration initiative
• Drive AWS cost optimization efforts and infrastructure efficiency improvements
• Consolidate Infrastructure-as-Code practices from CloudFormation and Ansible into Terraform
• Build, operate, and continuously improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment processes, and operational workflows
• Own Kubernetes architecture, deployment, scaling, monitoring, and troubleshooting
• Manage production incidents, perform root cause analysis, and implement long-term corrective actions
• Improve observability through monitoring, logging, alerting, and operational metrics
• Partner closely with Engineering and QA teams to establish standards, improve reliability, and increase deployment confidence
• Document systems, processes, and operational procedures to eliminate single points of failure and improve organizational knowledge sharing

TECHNICAL PRIORITIES

• AWS infrastructure modernization
• EC2 to EKS migration
• AWS cost optimization
• Terraform adoption and IaC standardization
• Lambda and serverless performance optimization
• AI integration within DevOps and engineering workflows

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• 6+ years of hands-on DevOps, Infrastructure Engineering, Platform Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering experience
• Deep expertise with AWS services including EC2, EKS, IAM, networking, security, and cost management
• Strong production experience operating and troubleshooting Kubernetes environments
• Advanced Terraform and Infrastructure-as-Code expertise
• Strong experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines
• Proficiency with Python and infrastructure automation
• Strong Linux systems administration and troubleshooting experience
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability solutions
• Hands-on networking experience including VPNs, firewall management, and hybrid-cloud connectivity
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose and resolve complex production issues

AI EXPECTATIONS

Candidates must be actively leveraging AI tools as part of their engineering and operational workflows. The successful candidate will be able to discuss how they use AI to improve productivity, automation, deployment quality, and operational efficiency, as well as the processes they use to validate AI-generated output before it reaches production environments.

IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS

This search is focused on identifying candidates who have true ownership experience. Candidates should be prepared to discuss specific examples where they personally made infrastructure decisions, led implementation efforts, owned production support, and were accountable for outcomes. Candidates advancing through the interview process should expect a hands-on technical assessment. Must be authorized to work in the United States.