Principal DevOps Engineer; AI Enablement

Guidacent is seeking a Principal Dev Ops Engineer experienced in AI daily use to improve individual and team work efforts. This is a senior individual-contributor role with significant influence: the right candidate will architect the delivery platform and developer experience (Dev Ex), define standards and reusable “paved roads,” make cross-team technical decisions, and mentor other engineers. We are looking for a strong Dev Ops practitioner first — someone deep in CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, cloud, containers, and observability — who has folded AI tooling such as Claude or Cursor into their daily workflow and used it to make engineering standards and practices measurably better.

Just as important, the right candidate knows how to be a careful, cost-aware user of these tools: getting real leverage from AI without token overuse. The role extends proven Dev Ops practice with AIOps and AI-assisted automation, and treats Dev Ex as a long‑term, principal‑owned concern. Formal people or team management is a welcome plus but not a requirement, but preference is for a hands‑on principal-level IC and player‑coach who wants to lead a team.

Candidates MUST be located in the Greater Seattle area and be willing to work onsite.

• Technical direction & architecture:
  Own the architecture for CI/CD, infrastructure, and the AI delivery platform; set the technical strategy and reference architectures that other teams build on.
• Developer experience (Dev Ex):
  Own developer experience as a long‑term, principal-level charter — continuously improve how engineers build, test, and ship, and treat Dev Ex as a product with its own metrics and roadmap.
• Standards & paved roads:
  Define and champion reusable templates, golden paths, and engineering standards that make delivery fast, safe, and self‑service — using AI tooling to raise the bar on those standards, not just to move faster.
• AI in the daily workflow:
  Set the example and the patterns for using AI coding tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor) day to day, and turn that hands‑on use into improved practices, reviews, and automation across the team — with disciplined, cost‑aware token usage rather than wasteful consumption.
• CI/CD delivery:
  Lead the design of continuous integration and deployment pipelines with automated testing, validation, and rollback.
• Infrastructure as code:
  Establish IaC and Git Ops practices (Terraform or equivalent) across one or more major clouds.
• Scaling AI tooling & AIOps:
  Drive org-wide adoption of AI‑assisted review, test generation, and AIOps‑driven incident detection and remediation, and quantify their impact on quality, velocity, and reliability.
• Observability & AIOps:
  Define observability strategy — telemetry, logging, automated anomaly detection, and alerting — and apply AIOps techniques to set SLOs that reduce mean‑time‑to‑resolution.
• Dev Sec Ops  & responsible AI use:
  Embed security scanning, secrets management, and sensible guardrails for how AI tooling is used (e.g., data handling, access, and review practices) across the delivery lifecycle.
• Reliability & cost:
  Set reliability practices (SLOs, DORA metrics) and optimize infrastructure and tooling cost — including efficient, token‑aware use of AI tools.
• Mentorship & influence:
  Mentor and uplevel engineers, lead technical reviews, and influence the broader engineering roadmap and ways of working.

• MUST be located in the Greater Seattle area and be willing to work onsite.
• 8+ years in Dev Ops, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering, including a track record of senior technical ownership.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and setting direction for CI/CD and infrastructure platforms used across multiple teams.
• Strong CI/CD experience (e.g., Git Hub Actions, Git Lab CI, Jenkins, or Azure Dev Ops).
• Deep proficiency with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or Cloud Formation) and at least one major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Hands‑on containerization and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes, including production‑scale operations.
• Strong scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or Go.
• Experience defining observability and monitoring…