Primary responsibilities

Provide technical direction and support to the rest of your team.

Facilitate communication of requirements, scoping, and design decisions between DevOps, Development, and Business teams.

Facilitate scheduling and completion of emergent and high priority work.

Participate in product roadmapping and long term planning for your project.

Develop tools and practices that will increase the efficiency of your team.

All of the responsibility in the DevOps Engineer role

The DevOps Team Lead position is a technical leadership position that combines regular DevOps and team facilitation.

The number one priority of the DevOps Team Lead is to make sure all of the engineers on their team are unblocked and able to work efficiently on their assigned tasks. This requires the Team Lead to keep tabs on all in-progress work for their team and recognize when to step in and provide guidance or direction, even if the developers on their team have not yet identified that it is needed.

In addition to making sure development work is unblocked, the Team Lead is also responsible for making sure that new code and infrastructure is being written and architected according to the standards and overall technical plan fitting with that team. This can include scheduling or leading technical design meetings to come up with development plans for stories and reviewing code for in-progress and completed stories.

The DevOps Team Lead is also the chief point of contact on their team for changes in team priorities. Team Leads are expected to meet with other development teams regularly and discuss changes in priority, including discussing the tradeoffs of priority changes and pushing back as appropriate. Team Leads also need to identify technical improvement work related to the project and feature development and facilitate balancing such improvements with ongoing feature development work. Lastly, Team Leads need to stay on top of emergent work for the team, and facilitate working that into the development schedule in an efficient and minimally disruptive way.

It is the expectation that a DevOps Team Lead will continue to take part in regular DevOps work in addition to the responsibilities listed above. For details on the DevOps engineer portion of this role, we encourage you to read our DevOps Engineer job description.

Key skills for this role

Time management and prioritization

Delegation

Technical expertise in DevOps, including cloud infrastructure

Collaboration

Ability to balance technical and non-technical goals and make pragmatic tradeoffs

All of the skills required of the DevOps Engineer role

Our interview process