Sphera is a leading global provider of enterprise software and services that enables companies to manage and optimize their environmental, health, safety and sustainability. Our mission is to create a safer, more sustainable and productive world.
Sphera is a portfolio company of Blackstone, a U.S.-based alternative asset investment company that focuses on private equity, technology and innovation, and more. Blackstone businesses succeed through strong partnerships, a personalized approach and a commitment to exceptional performance with uncompromising integrity. Sphera and Blackstone are leaders in the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) space.
We are guided by our core values of Customer Centricity, Accountability, Bias to Action, Innovation, and Collaboration. These values help us recruit the right talent to join our rapidly expanding team of around the globe. It is important to us that each and every Spherion is not only eager to challenge themselves and knows how to get work done but is an awesome addition to our company culture.
Sphera's Development Operations team builds, runs and secures the cloud environments behind our software products. The DevOps Manager leads part of the team day to day and works as a peer with the other managers in Development Operations: one set of standards, one way of planning and reporting, and cover for each other when someone is away.
As a DevOps Manager you make sure your team's work is planned, delivered on time and done safely. You are the person product teams, Customer Care and Professional Services rely on to turn their requests into working environments, and the person your engineers rely on for
clear priorities, unblocking and growth.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You don't need to write every pipeline, but you need to read one, review a change request, and challenge a design with confidence.
What you'll do
Lead and grow your team
- Lead a team of DevOps engineers and leads, including staff from partner vendors, by setting clear expectations, holding regular 1:1s, and giving specific, actionable feedback.
- Balance workloads across product-line support, projects, and tickets, and catch over-allocation and burnout risk early, before they affect delivery.
- Own the hiring process: define role requirements, conduct interviews, and onboard new engineers so they become productive quickly.
- Develop talent by coaching engineers toward lead roles and leads toward management.
Deliver the work
- Own your team’s backlog in Azure DevOps, turning requests into well-scoped epics, features, and backlog items with clear owners and due dates.
- Drive DevOps projects through milestones, schedules, and SLAs, and report status candidly, especially when something is running late.
- Review and approve customer environment and integration setups, ensuring requirements are complete before work begins.
Run safe, reliable operations
- Make sure every production change goes through change management, with the right approvals, testing and rollback plan.
- Own operational readiness for the services your team supports: monitoring, alerting, backups, DR validation and handover to support.
- Lead incident response and follow-up for your area and turn every significant incident into a lasting fix.
- Apply Sphera's information security rules in day-to-day work: least-privilege access, no shared or hard-coded secrets, and evidence for audits.
Work as one team with your fellow managers
- Agree shared standards with your fellow DevOps Managers for planning, estimation, reviews, on-call and reporting, so engineers and stakeholders get the same experience whichever team they work with.
- Cover each other's teams during absences and move people between teams when priorities call for it.
- Bring the Director a joint view of capacity, risks and priorities across the teams, rather than separate ones.
Keep improving the platform and the way we work
- Push for automation and infrastructure as code over manual steps, and standard patterns over one-offs.
- Partner with FinOps on cloud cost: right-sizing, decommissioning and making cost visible to product owners.
- Keep runbooks, handbook articles and the wiki current, so the next engineer can follow the process without being walked through it.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, Professional Services, Customer Care and InfoSec on roadmaps and dependencies.
What you'll bring
- 8+ years in DevOps, SRE, cloud infrastructure or platform engineering, including 2+ years leading engineers as a people manager or team lead.
- Deep, practical experience with Microsoft Azure: virtual machines and App Service; virtual networks, NSGs, private endpoints and Application Gateway; Entra ID, managed identities and RBAC; Key Vault; and Azure Service Bus.
- Strong working knowledge of Azure DevOps Boards and Pipelines, and of CI/CD for .NET and SQL Server applications.
- Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform or Bicep) and scripting (PowerShell, plus Bash or Python).
- A track record of running production systems under change control: CAB processes, incident management, DR and audit evidence.
- Comfort managing a distributed team across time zones, including contractors and vendor partners.
- Clear written and spoken communication. You can explain a technical risk to a product owner and a business priority to an engineer.
Nice to have
- Experience with a multi-tenant SaaS platform alongside single-tenant customer deployments.
- SSO and identity federation (Azure AD B2C, SAML, OIDC).
- ISO 27001 or SOC 2 environments.
- FinOps practice or tooling.
- Azure certifications (AZ-104, AZ-305, AZ-400)
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Sphera is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all colleagues.
This job description is intended to convey information essential to understanding the scope of the job and the general nature and level of work performed by job holders within this job. This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of qualifications, skills, efforts, duties, responsibilities or working conditions associated with the position.
