Director of DevOps & Containerization (pharma)

A leading pharmaceutical organization focused on innovation in research and drug delivery, is seeking a Director of DevOps and Containerization to drive the modernization of cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and container orchestration strategy. This is a hands-on leadership role, ideal for an engineer-manager with deep technical experience in automation, infrastructure-as-code, and container platforms, combined with strategic oversight of development and deployment workflows across the enterprise.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end design, implementation, and optimization of CI/CD pipelines across multiple product and research teams.
• Define and enforce DevOps best practices to support scalable, secure, and compliant deployment environments aligned with GxP and pharma data regulations.
• Architect, implement, and manage container platforms (Kubernetes, Docker) for both development and production workloads.
• Collaborate closely with application and data engineering teams to enable reproducible, automated environments across research and production systems.
• Oversee infrastructure configuration, IaC (Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent), and environment management across cloud and hybrid setups (AWS / Azure / Google Cloud Platform).
• Mentor DevOps engineers and guide the transition toward microservices-based deployments.
• Collaborate with QA, Compliance, and InfoSec to ensure systems meet all regulatory and security requirements.
• Drive performance monitoring, logging, and observability initiatives across containerized and cloud-native systems.
• Contribute to codebase and automation scripts as needed strong coding ability in Python and Java required.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10+ years of experience in software infrastructure, DevOps, or cloud engineering; at least 3+ years in a leadership or director-level capacity.
• Proven expertise in container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker, Helm) and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, etc.).
• Strong background in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform), including VPC design, IAM, and cost optimization.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation).
• Proficient in Java and Python for automation, deployment tooling, and application integration.
• Familiarity with pharma or regulated environments (GxP, HIPAA, FDA validation frameworks) strongly preferred.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

Nice to Have

• Exposure to data pipelines (Airflow, Kafka, or similar) and ML/AI infrastructure management.
• Understanding of container security (Falco, Aqua, Prisma Cloud) and DevSecOps principles.
• Experience modernizing legacy applications to containerized or serverless environments.