Staff Engineer - DevOps

Hard Rock Digital is building an internal developer platform based on Backstage to improve engineering velocity across the organization. The Staff DevOps Engineer will set the platform’s technical direction and roadmap, establish company-wide self-service standards, and lead adoption of AI-enabled engineering practices.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for our internal developer platform (Backstage), including catalog strategy, plugin architecture, and platform APIs
• Set company-wide standards for golden paths, self-service workflows, and "paved road" patterns spanning infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD, environments, and observability
• Make build-vs-buy and platform-investment decisions, evaluating Backstage plugins, third-party IDP tooling, and custom development against engineering-wide impact and cost
• Partner with engineering leadership across product, SRE, security, and data teams to align the platform roadmap with company-wide priorities and identify the highest-leverage investments
• Define and report on platform health and developer experience (DevEx) metrics—DORA metrics, self-service adoption rates, lead time to production, ticket deflection—and use them to prioritize the roadmap
• Drive adoption of the platform across teams, including migration strategies for legacy infrastructure and workflows onto self-service, Backstage-based patterns
• Architect complex, cross-cutting infrastructure and platform capabilities (multi-account AWS, EKS/Kubernetes platform primitives, Terraform/Terragrunt module ecosystems) that other engineers build on top of
• Champion security, compliance, and guardrail-by-design practices at the platform level, ensuring self-service capabilities are secure and compliant by default across a regulated, global environment
• Champion and scale AI-enabled engineering practices org-wide—evaluating and rolling out AI coding assistants and agentic tooling, embedding AI-assisted workflows into the platform itself, and helping teams adopt AI-enabled ways of working as a default, not an exception

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering, with 3+ years in a senior, staff, or equivalent technical leadership capacity
• A track record of driving org-wide adoption of self-service workflows and golden paths, including change management across multiple engineering teams
• Expert-level knowledge of AWS services and cloud-native architectures (multi-account setups, VPC design, IAM policies, networking) at an organizational scale
• Deep experience with Kubernetes (EKS preferred), Docker, and Helm, including designing platform-level abstractions on top of container orchestration
• Advanced Infrastructure as Code (IaC) expertise using Terraform/Terragrunt, with experience designing module ecosystems consumed by many teams via self-service
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, TypeScript/Node.js for Backstage plugin development) and experience architecting extensible platform tooling
• Experience setting CI/CD strategy and standards across an engineering organization, with tools such as GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, TeamCity, or comparable
• Strong understanding of observability, DevEx measurement, and how to translate platform investment into metrics leadership cares about (DORA metrics, lead time, adoption rates)
• Deep knowledge of networking, security hardening, and compliance in regulated industries, with experience embedding these as default, automated guardrails at the platform level
• A track record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction across multiple teams or the broader organization
• Demonstrated fluency with AI development tools (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) and a point of view on how to responsibly scale AI-enabled engineering practices across an organization, including embedding AI-assisted workflows into internal platforms
• The ability to operate at, and drive others toward, AI-enabled development velocity is a core expectation of this role, not a nice-to-have
• Demonstrated experience owning the architecture and roadmap for an internal developer platform at scale—Backstage strongly preferred—including catalog design, plugin ecosystems, and platform extensibility patterns
• Backstage strongly preferred
• (EKS preferred)
• AWS Professional Certification (Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, or SysOps Administrator) strongly preferred