Job Description:
Title: Sr. Director, DevOps & AppSec
Reports to: SVP, Engineering
Vacancy: New vacancy
The Role:
We are hiring a Sr. Director, DevOps to lead the global DevOps function at JD Power. Reporting directly to the SVP of Engineering, you will own the strategy, execution, and day-to-day operation of the platforms, pipelines, and tooling that our engineering and data organizations rely on to ship safely and quickly.
The Impact You Will Have in This Role:
This is a player-coach role. You will lead a small, senior team with global responsibility across our cloud footprint, CI/CD, observability, and developer experience. You should be equally comfortable setting multi-year strategy with executive leadership and rolling up your sleeves in a pull request or an incident bridge.
Success in this role looks like a leveraged, well-instrumented platform that lets product engineering teams move faster with fewer escalations, a measurably stronger reliability and security posture, and a high-trust DevOps team that other engineers actively want to work with.
What You’ll Be Doing in This Role:
- Set and execute the DevOps and platform engineering strategy across cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, secrets, and developer self-service.
- Lead, coach, and grow a high-performing team of DevOps engineers — including hiring, leveling, performance management, and succession planning.
- Operate as a player-coach: stay close to the technical work, contribute to architecture and code reviews, and step into incidents when needed.
- Partner with Security, Data, Product Engineering, and Architecture to embed security and compliance into the SDLC (DevSecOps).
- Own the cloud cost (FinOps) posture for the platforms under your scope and drive continuous, measurable improvement.
- Make and defend build-vs-buy decisions across the DevOps tooling stack; manage key vendor relationships.
- Be a thoughtful integrator of AI into engineering workflows where it produces real leverage.
Qualifications of this Role:
- 12+ years in software engineering, infrastructure, or DevOps, with 8+ years in management and time leading distributed or global teams.
- Track record of building and operating modern cloud platforms at scale — AWS strongly preferred; multi-cloud or hybrid experience a plus.
- Deep, current technical fluency in CI/CD, infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent), container orchestration (Kubernetes or equivalent), observability, and secrets management.
- Strong DevSecOps instincts — you’ve shipped real security improvements without grinding engineering velocity to a halt.
- Experience owning compliance work end-to-end (SOC 2, PCI, GDPR, HIPAA, or similar) in partnership with Security and Audit.
- Demonstrated ability to design for leverage: lean teams, self-service platforms, and clear demand management with the orgs you support.
- Experience in a data, analytics, or insights business.
- Prior experience scaling a DevOps team from single digits into the 15–30 range.
This position has a starting salary range of $225,000 - $250,000 USD/ $180,000 - $200,000 CAD per year. This is the range we reasonably and in good faith expect to pay for the role at the time of posting. An employee’s pay within the range is determined by a number of factors, including relevant skills, education, qualifications, experience, performance, business or organizational needs, and geographic location.