Who we are?

At Focused Labs, Principals are the highest level of practitioners and therefore experts of their craft. They play a crucial role in shaping and implementing DevOps best practices, driving organizational transformation, and ensuring the successful delivery of complex software projects. With clients they develop trust and influence - they are unintimidated and unintimidating. With colleagues, they set the standard for how we deliver success for clients. While developing strong, lasting relationships with clients through the successful delivery of their initiatives, Principals capture contracted revenue and drive the growth of the business through the extension and expansion of work. We deeply align the crafting of the extension of work with the success of its delivery. This position requires a deep understanding of DevOps methodologies, extensive hands-on experience with DevOps tools, and excellent leadership and communication skills.

Our values:

• Listen first - we are experts when it comes to software, but life-long learners in the domain of our customers. We listen, collaborate, and iterate closely with our clients.
• Learn why - we are deeply invested in the outcomes of our clients and apply our expertise to make wise technology decisions with them.
• Love your craft - we love programming and the craft of software engineering.

What would you be doing?

• Engagement Strategy & Execution: Principals kickoff initiatives with new clients and work with the stakeholders to continuously manage goals and execution. As such, you will be accountable for client success; expected to manage stakeholder relationships, project timeline and budget, and quality control of all deliverables.
• DevOps Practice Development: The Principal is the leader of the DevOps Practice across Focused Labs. Through past experience and work with clients, the Principal will continuously develop the playbook for DevOps engagements.
• Consultant Performance Management: Depending on scale of the client relationship, you may have consultants reporting directly to you or through the management of practice leads.
  • You act as the model for how delivery happens and level up the rest of the team to the expectations we hold for delivery.
  • You bring insights, learnings, and approaches from your engagements back to the rest of the delivery leadership team so that we can continually evolve our communication and training of practices across the entire delivery org. Your work helps us continuously drive towards increased quality and consistency.
• Extend & Expand Contracts: By building trust through delivery and gaining deep client contextual understanding, Principals lead the extension and expansion sales pursuits. This also deeply aligns the crafting of contracts with successful delivery.

What would you be doing?

• DevOps Strategy and Planning:
  • Assess current development and operations processes and collaborate with executive leadership to define and develop a comprehensive DevOps strategy aligned with client goals. Stay informed on industry trends and emerging technologies to drive innovation within the organization.
• Implementation and Automation:
  • Establishing enterprise-grade infrastructure plans and architect tailored solutions for clients that enable self-service application teams. Designing DevOps solutions tailored to the scale and needs of client application teams.
  • Establishing or building on definition and education for operating production enterprise solutions including SLAs, SLOs, security compliance, disaster recovery, etc.
  • Working with application teams to build automated deployment pipelines, ephemeral environments, and production deployment process. 
  • Educate and consult enterprise organizations on how to leverage modern DevOps practices and the benefits public cloud while keeping them security and compliant.
• Client Relationship Management:
  • Expand contract values with existing clients by identifying opportunities for additional services and solutions.
  • Act as a trusted advisor to clients, understanding their business needs and aligning DevOps strategies accordingly.
• Team Management:
  • Manage a team of consultants working with clients in their assigned book of business.
  • Provide guidance, support, and mentorship to consultants to ensure successful client engagements.

Why are we excited about you?

• You have 6+ years of experience as a DevOps engineer or related role.
• You are comfortable working with non-technical stakeholders and are comfortable participating in daily meetings with clients.
• You have experience managing consultants.
• You have exposure into web application development in Java/Spring, C#/.NET, Python/Django, Javascript/Typescript/Node or similar.
• You have experience as a consultant and a track record of expanding influence with clients and peers alike.
• You have hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and configuration management tools for efficient infrastructure provisioning and management like Terraform, Ansible, or CDK.
• You have experience and opinion on how to manage 24/7 support, leveraging tools like PagerDuty, DataDog, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana.
• You have hands on experience working with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) tools and platforms available across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• You’ve used operational monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, LogDNA, etc.
• You have strong computer networking fundamentals including experience with configuring routers, switches, firewalls, or load balancers.
• You navigate ambiguity and can lead teams through it.

What to know before you apply: 

We believe employees should be paid fairly and equitably. Salary ranges may vary depending on your location and previous experience. The Chicago and Denver base salary ranges for this role are $150,000 - $225,000 with an additional commission rate.