{"id":1927830,"url":"https://alion.io/job/exostar-director-of-devops","title":"Director of DevOps","company":{"id":1806763,"name":"Exostar","domain":"exostar.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/exostar","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"UltiPro","truth_index":null},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Herndon, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":179000,"max_usd":335000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":2192},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AIOps","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Bicep","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"FedRAMP","optional":false},{"name":"GitOps","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"NIST 800-171","optional":false},{"name":"Self-Healing","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"SOC 2","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"NIST 800-53","optional":true},{"name":"PKI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-21T17:20:34Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-06","last_verified_at":"2026-10-14T18:48:53Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":23,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":23},"description":"Position Overview\nThe Director of DevOps sets the strategy and runs the day-to-day for Exostar’s global, 24x7 production operations. The role is the technical and operational backbone for every customer-impacting issue: it owns the engineering response that Customer Support depends on, partners closely with Support on customer outcomes, and is the single accountable leader on the engineering side of every Sev-1/Sev-2. This is a highly visible role in a fast-growing, fast-moving company - every dollar of cloud and tooling spend gets reported up through this leader, and every step we take toward an AI-native operations posture is driven from this seat.\nThe successful candidate is an automation-first technologist, a cross-organizational operator who is equally credible with engineering, product, security, support, and finance, and a process-minded leader who treats manual toil as a defect and uses AI as the default tool to eliminate it.\nResponsibilities:\nYour day if you join us:\n24x7 Operations & Customer Issue Response\nOwn production uptime, performance, and reliability across all Exostar SaaS products on a 24x7 basis, including SLO definition, on-call rotation, incident command, and stakeholder communications during major incidents. \nOwn the engineering and operational response to every customer-impacting issue. Partner with Customer Support on triage, root cause, communications, and resolution - Support owns the customer relationship; this role owns the technical fix and the systemic prevention. \nDrive blameless postmortems and ensure every Sev-1/Sev-2 results in a durable engineering or process fix - not a “we’ll watch for it next time.” \nBe the single accountable engineering leader when a customer asks “what happened, and what are you doing about it.” \nAutomation-First Operating Model\nTreat manual operational work as a defect. Set and enforce a target for the percentage of operational toil eliminated each quarter. \nDrive infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, automated remediation, and self-healing patterns across the production estate. \nBuild a deployment platform that lets engineering teams ship safely and frequently without DevOps as a bottleneck. \nOwn CI/CD pipeline strategy, golden paths, and the developer experience for shipping to production. \nAI-Native Operations\nStand up and continuously evolve an AIOps practice: AI-driven anomaly detection, log summarization, intelligent alerting, and agentic incident triage. \nDeploy AI agents to draft runbooks, post first-pass postmortems, and accelerate engineering investigation of customer-reported issues. \nMine operational and incident data with AI for recurring failure modes and capacity drift and turn those into engineering bets. \nCross-Organizational Leadership\nOperate as a peer to engineering, product, security, customer support, and finance leaders. This role lives at the intersection of those functions and has to be effective in all of them. \nPartner with Customer Support on the joint operating model: incident handoffs, ticket-to-engineering workflows, status communications, and shared metrics for customer experience during issues. \nPartner with Product Management and Finance on launch-readiness, capacity planning, and pricing/COGS modeling for new and existing services. \nPartner with the Security Office on compliance, audit readiness, and secure-by-default infrastructure (SOC 2, NIST 800-171, CMMC, FedRAMP-adjacent). \nRepresent Operations in customer escalations, audit conversations, and revenue-impacting deals. \nCOGS Management & Financial Reporting\nOwn the cost-of-goods line for Exostar’s hosted services. Forecast, track, and explain it monthly to Finance and senior leadership. \nDrive cloud cost optimization (commitments, right-sizing, idle elimination, architectural efficiency) as an ongoing discipline, not an annual project. \nBuild the unit-economics views Finance needs to run the business: cost per customer, per product, per environment. \nOwn vendor relationships and contracts for infrastructure, observability, and managed services; lead RFPs and renewals. \nProcess & Operational Rigor\nStand up and maintain the operating cadence: weekly ops reviews, monthly business reviews, quarterly capacity planning, incident review boards (jointly with Customer Support and Engineering leadership). \nDefine and report KPIs and KRIs the CTO and CFO can use to run the business: availability, MTTR, deploy frequency, COGS per unit, automation coverage, and engineering-side metrics on customer-impacting issues. \nMaintain the system of record for production inventory, dependencies, and configuration. \nOwn the disaster recovery and business continuity program - including the drills, not just the plans. \nTeam Leadership\nLead, coach, and grow the DevOps team. \nBuild a culture where engineers default to automation and the whole team takes pride in customer outcomes - even when the customer relationship is held by a partner team. \nHire for automation instinct, technical depth, and cross-functional collaboration. Performance-manage against an automation and AI-leverage bar, not headcount growth. \nQualifications:\nYou are a great fit for this role if you:\nRequired\n10+ years running production technical operations for a customer-facing SaaS business with hard uptime SLAs. \n5+ years leading multi-disciplinary teams of 25+ across DevOps/SRE and IT. \nDeep, hands-on technical depth: cloud (AWS and/or Azure), Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Bicep), CI/CD, observability stacks, secrets and identity. This is not a role for a manager who lost their technical edge five years ago. \nDemonstrated bias toward automation over headcount - with specific examples of toil eliminated, deploy frequency increased, or incident volume reduced through engineering. \nTrack record of using AI in production: LLM-based assistants, agentic workflows, AI-driven observability - not just experimenting with it. \nStrong financial fluency: built and defended a multi-million-dollar infrastructure budget, owned COGS, partnered with a CFO/Finance organization on unit economics. \nDemonstrated success partnering with Customer Support, Customer Success, or equivalent functions on joint operating models, incident handoffs, and shared customer-experience metrics. \nStrong customer-facing presence: composed on a Sev-1 bridge with a CISO and credible in a QBR with a Fortune 100 customer. \nExcellent written and verbal communication. This person writes the postmortem, briefs senior leadership, and explains the COGS variance - clearly. \nProcess discipline and detail orientation: reads the runbook, audits the dashboard, and notices the inconsistency. \nExperience operating in regulated environments - SOC 2, NIST 800-171, ITAR, CMMC, or FedRAMP. \nU.S. Citizens only- Due to customer requirements, U.S. Citizenship is required. Ability to gain and maintain Trusted Role is required\nHybrid: Herndon, VA (3x/week)\nPreferred Qualifications:\nYou are exactly who we are looking for if you:\nDirect experience standing up an AIOps program or deploying AI agents inside a production operations function. \nExperience in defense supply chain, aerospace, or other regulated industries. \nFamiliarity with FedRAMP Moderate, CMMC Level 2, and NIST 800-53 / 800-171 Rev 2 control families. \nExperience with PKI, HSMs, and identity-bound infrastructure. \nCareer arc that includes both “build” (engineering org) and “run” (operations org) leadership. \nEducation\nBachelor’s degree in a technical discipline. \nAdvanced degree preferred. \nExostar - The Company:\nExostar's cloud-based platforms create exclusive communities within the Aerospace and Defense, Life Sciences, and other highly regulated industries where members securely collaborate, share information, and operate compliantly. Within these communities we build trust. By analyzing community data, we provide insights and intelligence, enabling organizations to make better, timelier decisions, to mitigate risk, and operate more efficiently.\nWe believe in employee development: we promote internally and provide training and educational assistance\nWe provide a fun, engaged workplace, with social and community-building events\nWe offer comprehensive benefits and flexible time off plans\nExostar is an Equal Opportunity Employment Employer. The company provides equal employment opportunities to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital status, disability status or genetic information. Exostar is committed to providing equal employment opportunities for all persons in all facets of employment including recruiting, hiring, compensation, promotion, training, benefits, transfers and working conditions.\nThe pay range for this position is $180,000k - $200,000k/yr; however, the final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, skills, qualifications, and location. Exostar also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance, EAP, Flexible Spending Accounts, 401(k) matching, flexible time off and sick leave.","description_format":"text","description_chars":9120,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":5,"team_size_min":25,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Flexible time off","Health insurance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Cybersecurity","Team Communication & Collaboration"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-05T20:49:03Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":64,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.85,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":22,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:4","velocity","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-10-14T06:34:16Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/exostar-director-of-devops","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/exostar-director-of-devops.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-14T18:58:34Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":24788,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-15T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":1806763},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=1806763"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fexostar-director-of-devops"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fexostar-director-of-devops"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fexostar-director-of-devops"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/exostar-director-of-devops\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fexostar-director-of-devops"}]}