Principal DevOps Engineer

Staff / Principal Dev Ops Engineer

Location:

New York City | Hybrid Department: AI Platform & Infrastructure Team

Reports to:

Vangie Shue – Principal Engineering Manager

App Gate secures and protects an organization’s most valuable assets with its high performance Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution and Cyber Advisory Services. App Gate ZTNA is the only direct‑routed Zero Trust solution built for peak performance, superior protection and seamless interoperability. App Gate Cyber Advisory Services harden your security posture and ensure business continuity. App Gate safeguards Fortune 500 enterprises and government agencies worldwide.

As we expand our platform, we are standing up a new AI Platform & Infrastructure team: the engine room of App Gate’s AI strategy. This team owns the infrastructure layer that every next‑generation security capability is built on, from network observability to AI‑driven threat detection and the secure operation of emerging Agentic AI systems. We need a Staff or Principal Dev Ops Engineer to design and build the deployment vehicle of our cloud and AI infrastructure, set the standards the rest of the team will build on, and grow the surrounding engineers into a capable platform team.

You will make foundational decisions around cloud architecture, IaC conventions, CI/CD, observability, and on‑call, codify them so they scale, and mentor a team that is still developing deep Dev Ops expertise.

• Build the Platform: design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines and self‑service tooling from a greenfield starting point, enabling product teams to build, test, and deploy safely and quickly with automated guardrails, rollbacks, and paved paths.
• Stand up and operate container orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes, including self‑managed, stateful technologies such as Kafka and Elasticsearch, running reliably in production.
• Infrastructure as Code: automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration management using Terraform and Helm, with reusable modules and patterns others can safely build on.
• Observability from day one: instrument monitoring, logging, and alerting across services and infrastructure using Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK stack; define SLOs, error budgets, and operational health metrics the team will trust.
• Security Best Practices: implement security best practices across infrastructure and deployment workflows—including secrets management, least‑privilege access, certificate and key management, vulnerability remediation, and secure‑by‑default configuration.
• Mentor and level up the team: coach engineers who are strong but new to Dev Ops/infra, run design reviews, pair on hard problems, write the docs and playbooks, and deliberately transfer expertise so the team can own and evolve the platform without depending on any one person.
• Operationalize AI/ML: build the MLOps foundation for App Gate’s AI products—model serving and inference pipelines, model deployment, versioning, and drift monitoring, and the experiment‑tracking and lifecycle tooling (MLflow, Kubeflow, Sage Maker) that lets data scientists ship models safely and repeatably.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally: partner with data scientists, product teams, and leadership to align platform investment with App Gate’s strategic vision.

• Extensive Dev Ops, platform, infrastructure, or SRE engineering experience with a track record of operating production systems at scale (8+ years for Staff, 12+ years for Principal).
• Hands‑on experience standing up infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines in a greenfield or early‑stage environment and making foundational decisions.
• Observability expertise implementing Prometheus, Grafana, Open Telemetry, or the ELK stack, along with SLO and error‑budget practice.
• Security mindset: familiarity with implementing secrets management, vulnerability remediation, and secure‑by‑default design in infrastructure and deployment workflows.
• Engineering craft: fluency in a primary backend language (Python, Go, or similar) and a strong bias toward automation, testing, and reliable, maintainable systems.
• Mentorship & leadership experience: a proven ability to coach and elevate the skills of engineering peers.

App Gate offers a comprehensive benefits package, competitive compensation, and opportunities to work on cutting‑edge AI and security solutions in a hybrid, New York City environment.