Lead DevOps Engineer

At David Zwirner, we look to be an industry leader in our field, with our artists at the center of what we do. Our global exhibition program expands beyond our locations in New York, London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Paris, representing seventy artists and estates. Home to innovative, singular, and pioneering exhibitions across a variety of media and genres. Active in both the primary and secondary markets, David Zwirner has helped foster the careers of some of the most influential artists today.

About the Opportunity

Lead DevOps Engineer

David Zwirner seeks an experienced and strategic Lead DevOps Engineer to guide the maturation of our infrastructure and provide coverage across European time zones (UTC to UTC +3). This role emphasizes technical leadership, strategic planning, and team mentorship. You will be responsible for enhancing the security, reliability, and resilience of our cloud footprint: primarily AWS, with additional environments including Azure, GCP, Alibaba Cloud, Databricks, and Vercel.

As the leader of the DevOps function, you will define and execute the strategic roadmap while remaining hands‑on with your team. We’re seeking a pragmatic leader who will take full ownership of our infrastructure, systematically address technical debt, and champion a culture of operational excellence and security. Candidates must be diligent, extremely organized, and possess excellent prioritization and communication skills.The core engineering team operates on New York hours, so this position will play a key leadership and coverage role for EMEA.

What you’ll do:

• Leadership: Lead direction and mentor for the DevOps team; set technical direction for infrastructure and security; foster a culture of ownership, reliability, and continuous improvement.

• Roadmap Ownership & Strategy: Define, own, and drive the Infrastructure & Security Roadmap, prioritizing infrastructure ownership, profound monitoring, disaster recovery, developer experience, and security hardening.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Inventory and capture unmanaged resources in Terraform (and CDK/SST where required); create reusable modules and guardrails; institute code reviews and change management.

• Platform Operations (AWS‑first): Design and operate services built on ECS (Fargate), ECR, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, ALB/CloudFront, WAF, Lambda, EventBridge, CloudWatch; improve networking, IAM, and resilience.

• Resilience & Reliability: Modernize critical workloads; design and run disaster recovery drills; automate backups/restore; codify RPO/RTO targets and runbooks; lead incident response and postmortems.

• Observability & On‑Call: Standardize monitoring/alerting with Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry, PagerDuty; implement SLOs and noise‑reduction baselines; maintain a humane on‑call rotation.

• Security Hardening: Mature the configuration and rollout of tools like Jit and CrowdStrike; improve firewall/WAF rules; enforce secrets management and least‑privilege access; champion threat modeling and automated scanning.

• Collaboration & Governance: Serve as a key technical voice on the Architecture Review Board; partner with Product and Engineering to align solutions with operational standards and business goals.

What you need to have:

• Legal authorization to work in the UK.

• Track record in a senior/lead DevOps, SRE, or Platform role, including mentorship of engineers.

• Expert‑level Terraform (including importing existing resources and taming legacy estates).

• Deep, hands‑on experience with AWS (ECS, RDS, ElastiCache, Lambda, ALB, WAF, S3, CloudFront, EventBridge, CloudWatch) and production networking/IAM.

• Proven design and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) and container workflows (Docker, ECS Fargate or Kubernetes).

• Proficiency with modern observability/monitoring (Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry, PagerDuty), incident response, and incident retrospectives.

• Strong background in cloud security principles and practical hardening.

• Ability to define and execute a technical roadmap and communicate with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

What we would like you to have:

• Experience with GCP, Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and managed platforms (Databricks, Vercel).

• Familiarity with SST/CDK, Next.js/Vercel delivery flows, and performance considerations for web platforms.

• VPN/zero‑trust networking (e.g., Tailscale); perimeter hardening and WAF tuning.

Please submit a resume and cover letter, and be prepared to provide three (3) professional references upon request.