Senior Manager, DevOps

Why Ironwood Digital ? Ironwood Digital is a mission-driven financial software company that aims to create better customer experiences for distressed borrowers. Consumers today want personal, digital-first experiences that align with their lifestyles, especially when it comes to managing finances. Ironwood Digital ’s approach uses machine learning to engage each customer digitally and adjust strategies in real time in response to their interactions. The Ironwood Digital team includes inspired data scientists, financial services industry experts and customer experience fanatics building technology to serve people in a way that recognizes their unique needs and preferences as human beings and endeavoring toward ensuring nobody gets locked out of the financial system. Ironwood Digital Products is seeking a highly experienced and strategic Sr. Manager, DevOps to lead our infrastructure and platform engineering efforts. This role is critical in driving our cloud architecture strategy, establishing elite CI/CD standards, and ensuring the scalability and reliability of our machine learning-driven products. Reporting to the Sr. Director, Program & Operations, you will lead the evolution of our internal developer platform and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) architecture. The ideal candidate is a hands-on leader with a "systems-thinking" mindset. We are looking for a visionary who thrives on solving complex distributed systems challenges and considers leveraging GenAI and AIOps tooling second-nature for optimizing system performance and automation. What You'll Do (Technical Leadership & Strategy): Define and execute the long-term strategic vision for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD evolution, and cloud-native architecture to support Ironwood Digital ’s scaling needs. Lead the design and implementation of self-service internal platforms to reduce developer cognitive load, enabling feature teams to deploy and manage services with minimal friction at increased velocity. Act as the primary stakeholder for cloud spend (AWS); drive cost-optimization initiatives and lead contract negotiations for the DevOps toolstack and third-party vendors. Ensure the infrastructure architecture supports strict High Availability (HA) requirements and robust Disaster Recovery (DR) protocols, maintaining system integrity across multiple regions. Oversee the implementation and evolution of comprehensive monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing systems, leveraging AIOps to move from reactive to predictive system maintenance. Champion security by design by integrating automated vulnerability scanning, secret management, and compliance checks directly into the automated build pipelines. Serve as the ultimate escalation point for major production outages, facilitating blameless post-mortem reviews that focus on systemic improvements rather than individual error. Maintain deep technical currency in container orchestration (Kubernetes), serverless patterns, and modern automation frameworks to provide meaningful mentorship and architectural guidance to senior engineering staff. What You'll Do (Hands-On Engineering & Technical Execution): Maintain the ability to write and review high-quality code in languages like Python, Go, or Bash to automate complex operational tasks and system integrations. Hands-on development of Terraform Infrastructure as Code for resource provisioning. Directly architect and troubleshoot complex CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Atlantis), ensuring build-and-deploy cycles are optimized for speed and reliability. Proactively manage and tune container orchestration environments, including hands-on configuration of Ingress controllers, declarative GitOps workflows, and cluster autoscaling. Lead from the front during critical incidents by conducting deep-dive technical analysis across the EKS stack, troubleshooting Node-level kernel panics, VPC CNI networking bottlenecks, and RDS performance constraints to minimize MTTR Conduct hands-on audits of cloud configurations and IAM policies, implementing "least privilege" access controls and automated remediation scripts. Directly manage the integration and API configurations between various tools in the DevOps stack (e.g., connecting Jira, VictorOps, Slack, and Observe for seamless incident flow). What You'll Do (People Leadership & Engineering Collaboration): Recruit, hire, and develop a world-class team of DevOps Engineers; provide career pathing and technical mentorship to foster a culture of continuous learning. Partner closely with Engineering Managers to align infrastructure deliverables with product roadmap, ensuring DevOps is an accelerator rather than a bottleneck. Collaborate with the Quality Engineering and Security leadership to define and enforce "Definition of Done" standards that include automated testing and security gates. Set clear, measurable goals (KPIs and OKRs) for the team, conducting regular performance reviews and providing feedback to drive individual and collective excellence. Lead internal Brunch & Learn