Manager, IT - Automation

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the Automation team, including engineers and specialists focused on IaC development, automation scripting, configuration management, and tool implementation across colo and multi-cloud environments.
• Oversee the design, build, and maintenance of IaC solutions and automation pipelines for provisioning, configuring, and managing infrastructure in Azure, GCP, OCI, and on-premises/colocation setups.
• Drive standardization of automation practices, including IaC templates (e.g., Terraform for multi-cloud consistency, ARM/Bicep for Azure-specific), configuration management (e.g., Ansible), CI/CD integration for infrastructure, version control, and reusable modules/patterns.
• Establish and enforce governance, best practices, security controls, compliance baselines, testing frameworks, and approval workflows for automation artifacts to ensure reliability, auditability, and risk reduction.
• Manage incident resolution, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement for automation-related issues, including root-cause analysis and preventive measures across environments.
• Cook up coordination automation for hybrid/multi-cloud connectivity, migrations, disaster recovery, scaling, and colo-to-cloud transitions, promoting portability and consistency.
• Monitor, optimize, and report on automation efficiency, resource utilization, deployment velocity, cost savings from automation, and security posture.
• Define, track, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics for automation maturity, IaC adoption, pipeline reliability, error rates, and business impact (e.g., reduced provisioning time).
• Lead modernization and expansion initiatives, such as advancing GitOps workflows, self-service automation portals, policy-as-code, observability integration, and adoption of advanced tools/practices.
• Collaborate with Security and Risk teams to embed controls (e.g., secrets management, vulnerability scanning, encryption standards, access governance) into automation processes.
• Mentor and coach team members and cross-functional engineers; facilitate design reviews, knowledge sharing, training, and skill-building in IaC and automation.
• Act as the primary escalation point for automation tool/provider issues (e.g., HashiCorp Terraform, Ansible/Red Hat, cloud-native tools), manage relevant vendor/partner relationships, and contribute to strategic automation roadmap.
• Provide executive-level reporting on Automation COE performance, maturity progress, risks, cost benefits, and recommendations for further investment.

Skills & Competencies

• Proven leadership in managing automation, DevOps, or IaC-focused teams in multi-cloud, hybrid, or enterprise infrastructure environments.
• Strong expertise in IaC and automation tools, particularly Terraform (multi-cloud), Ansible (configuration), with familiarity in cloud-native options (e.g., Azure Bicep/ARM, GCP Deployment Manager, OCI Resource Manager), Git, CI/CD (e.g., Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Solid operational mindset with experience in automation reliability, pipeline management, troubleshooting complex infrastructure issues, and driving efficiency gains.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills to explain automation concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, influence adoption, and build consensus.
• Collaborative leader skilled at mentoring engineers, implementing governance/process improvements, and fostering a culture of automation excellence.
• Analytical abilities for optimizing automation workflows, measuring ROI, resolving multi-environment challenges, and making data-driven decisions.
• Knowledge of infrastructure security best practices, compliance frameworks (e.g., SOC2, GDPR), policy-as-code, and challenges in multi-cloud/colo automation.
• The ability to work outside normal hours, when needed, is expected, and participation in an on-call rotation is required for this position.