Director of DevOps

The Director of Dev Ops 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.

The 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.

• Own 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.
• Own 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.
• Drive 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.”
• Be the single accountable engineering leader when a customer asks “what happened, and what are you doing about it.”

• Treat manual operational work as a defect. Set and enforce a target for the percentage of operational toil eliminated each quarter.
• Drive infrastructure‑as‑code, Git Ops, automated remediation, and self‑healing patterns across the production estate.
• Build a deployment platform that lets engineering teams ship safely and frequently without Dev Ops as a bottleneck.
• Own CI/CD pipeline strategy, golden paths, and the developer experience for shipping to production.

• Stand up and continuously evolve an AIOps practice: AI‑driven anomaly detection, log summarization, intelligent alerting, and agentic incident triage.
• Deploy AI agents to draft runbooks, post first‑pass postmortems, and accelerate engineering investigation of customer‑reported issues.
• Mine operational and incident data with AI for recurring failure modes and capacity drift and turn those into engineering bets.

• Operate 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.
• Partner with Customer Support on the joint operating model: incident handoffs, ticket‑to‑engineering workflows, status communications, and shared metrics for customer experience during issues.
• Partner with Product Management and Finance on launch‑readiness, capacity planning, and pricing/COGS modeling for new and existing services.
• Partner with the Security Office on compliance, audit readiness, and secure‑by‑default infrastructure (SOC 2, NIST 800‑171, CMMC, FedRAMP‑adjacent).
• Represent Operations in customer escalations, audit conversations, and revenue‑impacting deals.
• Own the cost‑of‑goods line for Exostar’s hosted services. Forecast, track, and explain it monthly to Finance and senior leadership.
• Drive cloud cost optimization (commitments, right‑sizing, idle elimination, architectural efficiency) as an ongoing discipline, not an annual project.
• Build the unit‑economics views Finance needs to run the…