DevOps Software Engineering Manager

NO SPONSORSHIP - NO OPT Manager, Software Engineering DevOps Salary:$170k - $200k plus 15% Bonus LOCATION: Chicago, IL Hybrid 3 days onsite and 2 days remote You will lead a team of 6-10, 24/7 support, L1, L2 support. Application deployment container platform ops middleware support incident management monitoring observability configuration release engineering platform operations scripting automation SLA frameworks harness Jenkins Kubernetes apache kakfa splunk Dynatrace datadog. Lead L1 and L2 support engineers in all incident response activities including triage, investigation, coordination, resolution, closure, and post-incident reporting.Oversee technical analysis of environment incidents across application deployments, middleware, and platform layers while coordinating response activities with internal engineering, platform, and application development teams.Serve as Tier 3 escalation point for complex incidents beyond L2 capability — triaging, directing, and driving resolution across Platform (k8s, Kafka, TFE), S&I (deployment, middleware, storage, network), Security (Vault, certs, secrets), and App Dev teams.Own the full incident lifecycle — from first alert through to RCA documentation and permanent fix or accepted workaround.Drive post-incident reviews for all P1 and P2 incidents, ensuring root cause is identified, documented, and actioned — not filed. Technical Skills: Deployment & Pipeline tooling: Harness (continuous delivery pipelines, deployment verification, rollback automation), Jenkins (CI/CD pipeline management, job configuration, build troubleshooting), GitHub (branching strategies, pull request workflows, pipeline integration).Container & orchestration platforms: Kubernetes (k8s) pod lifecycle management, namespace operations, log retrieval, resource troubleshooting, and coordination with Platform teams on cluster-level issues.Messaging & streaming platforms: Apache Kafka topic management, consumer group monitoring, lag analysis, and escalation to Platform for broker-level issues.Secrets & configuration management: HashiCorp Vault — secrets retrieval, token/lease troubleshooting, policy review, and escalation to Security teams for certificate and secrets rotation.Monitoring & observability: Proficiency in at least two production monitoring toolsets (e.g. Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, Prometheus/Grafana) alert triage, dashboard interpretation, log analysis, and tuning requests.Middleware platforms: Working knowledge of middleware infrastructure including application servers, messaging brokers, storage integrations, and network-layer dependencies sufficient to triage, gather diagnostics, and route correctly to L3.Incident and ticketing platforms: ServiceNow or equivalent ITSM tooling incident creation, SLA tracking, problem record management, and reporting.MTTR and operational metrics: Ability to build and maintain operational dashboards and reports covering MTTR, SLA compliance, alert-to-incident ratio, repeat incident rate, and deployment success rate.Education and/or Experience: Minimum 5 years of hands-on environment operations, production support, or infrastructure operations experience, including interdisciplinary experience across four or more of the following: application deployment pipelines, container platform operations, middleware support, incident management, monitoring and observability, configuration management, release engineering, platform operations, or scripting and automation.Technical experience and comprehensive knowledge of production environment failure modes — including deployment failures, configuration drift, platform instability, and integration breakdowns — and the methodologies used to diagnose and resolve them.Demonstrated experience defining and enforcing SLA frameworks in a tiered support model (L1/L2/L3 or equivalent).Familiarity with financial services or other regulated-industry production environments is a strong advantage — understanding of change governance, audit requirements, and production access controls.Industry knowledge of current and emerging practices in environment operations, platform reliability, and support automation.Shift work and on-call availability required — including 24×7 on-call response capacity and availability during planned and emergency maintenance windows.Previous people management or team lead experience required; formal people management experience