Principal DevOps Architect

About the role

Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) - the leading destination for innovative management thinking. We reach lifelong learners to improve the practice of management in a changing world. This mission inspires each of us to unlock the leader in everyone - including you!

The opportunity

Do you thrive at the crossroads of software delivery, cloud infrastructure, and operational excellence? Are you passionate about increasing delivery velocity while raising the bar on reliability, security, and observability? If so, we'd like to meet you.

We are seeking a seasoned Principal DevOps Architect to advance our DevOps maturity while helping shape the next generation of cloud-native and AI-enabled platforms at Harvard Business Publishing. As a key member of the Technology Operations leadership team, you will define and lead our DevOps and platform architecture strategy, partnering closely with software engineering, cloud operations, and security to build secure, scalable, observable, and resilient solutions that accelerate product innovation and business growth.

This role requires a hands-on architect who can bridge software engineering and operations, helping teams design and deploy modern AWS-native applications while establishing the automation, governance, reliability, and developer enablement capabilities needed to operate them at scale.

What you'll do

• Design and implement a robust, scalable, and secure DevOps environment that enables continuous integration and deployment aligned to business objectives.
• Partner with software engineering teams to design and evolve next-generation cloud-native and AI-enabled application architectures, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, observable, and operationally sustainable from day one.
• Provide architectural guidance on application modernization, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and AI-enabled platforms, helping engineering teams translate product requirements into production-ready solutions.
• Build reusable platform capabilities, reference architectures, and developer enablement patterns that accelerate delivery and improve engineering productivity.
• Design, implement, and optimize CI/CD pipelines, deployment patterns, and platform services that improve delivery velocity, reliability, and developer experience.
• Establish and maintain DevOps architecture standards, best practices, and governance models to ensure consistency, quality, and repeatability across teams and systems.
• Champion Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices so infrastructure is provisioned, configured, secured, observed, and managed in a consistent and repeatable manner.
• Lead collaboration across engineering, cloud operations, and security teams to deliver secure, reliable, and scalable cloud platforms.
• Define and evolve observability standards (logging, metrics, tracing) and leverage telemetry to identify bottlenecks, improve performance, and increase operational reliability.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of automation, ownership, continuous learning, and shared responsibility.
• Develop and maintain clear, durable documentation for architecture decisions, platform standards, and operational processes.

What you'll brin g

• 8+ years of experience designing and operating highly available, scalable cloud platforms and applying DevOps principles to modern software delivery.
• Proven ability to define platform and DevOps architecture strategy, establish standards, and drive adoption across multiple engineering teams.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and operating enterprise CI/CD platforms and toolchains (e.g., Jenkins), with a focus on reliability, repeatability, security, and developer experience.
• Expertise with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or CloudFormation, including reusable modules, automation patterns, and governance controls.
• Deep hands-on AWS architecture experience, including designing and operating multi-account environments, landing zones, and governance frameworks using services such as AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and IAM Identity Center.
• Demonstrated expertise designing AWS-native solutions using services such as ECS/Fargate, Lambda, Cognito, SQS/SNS, RDS/Aurora, Route 53, CloudFront, and related platform services.
• Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs and partnering with engineering teams to design scalable, maintainable, cloud-native applications.
• Demonstrated experience designing and building cloud-native architectures, including microservices, event-driven systems, API-driven integrations, and AI-enabled platforms.
• Strong software engineering mindset with the ability to influence technical design decisions and guide the evolution of modern cloud applications.
• Experience supporting AI/ML workloads and platforms, including the infrastructure, deployment, observability, security, and operational patterns required to run AI-enabled applications in production.
• Experience with container platforms and orchestration, including secure image management, deployment strategies, and platform operations.
• Deep understanding of observability, reliability engineering, and operational excellence, including logging, metrics, tracing, and performance optimization.
• Deep understanding of DevSecOps principles and security best practices, including least-privilege access, secrets management, vulnerability management, secure SDLC controls, and identity architectures (OIDC/SSO).
• Familiarity with ephemeral environment patterns and automation for safe, cost-effective testing and preview deployments.
• Experience leveraging AI coding assistants to develop and review enterprise-grade solutions with attention to quality, security, and maintainability.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and documentation skills with the ability to influence engineering, operations, and security stakeholders.

You'll stand out if you have

• Experience helping engineering teams design, deploy, and operate AI-enabled applications and services in production.
• Experience building platform capabilities that accelerate the development and deployment of AI/ML solutions.
• Experience building or supporting internal developer platforms and self-service engineering capabilities.
• Advanced experience with Jenkins and enterprise CI/CD platform administration.

What we offer

As a mission-driven global company, Harvard Business Publishing is committed to fostering a culture of inclusion, trust, and engagement where everyone is welcome, valued, respected, and feels they belong. In addition to a competitive compensation and benefits package, we offer meaningful programs focused on career development and employee wellness, such as education reimbursement and early-release Summer Fridays!

While this role is open to remote candidates, individuals based in the Boston area will be prioritized due to onsite collaboration needs. The anticipated compensation range for this role is $160,000-$175,000, dependent on experience and qualifications.

• Above is the annualized pay range for this position.
• In addition, this position includes the opportunity to earn our annual Performance Based Variable Pay Program.
• Actual salary will be set based upon a range of factors, including external benchmark market data, individual knowledge, skills, experience, location and internal equity.