DevOps Engineering Manager

Job Description

ABOUT THE JOB

The ACLU seeks applicants for the full-time position of DevOps Engineering Manager in the TechnologyDepartment of the ACLU’s National office in New York, NY. This is a hybrid role that has in-office requirements of two (2) days per week or eight (8) days per month.

The ACLU Technology Department is a broad umbrella covering both the ACLU’s Analytics and its Product & Engineering teams, two robust and innovative divisions that power the work of the ACLU. The department provides trusted, dependable, and impactful analytics, engineering, as well as product management and product design expertise for the ACLU. In partnership with experts across the ACLU, the technology team delivers best-in-class solutions, services, and innovation that advance the ACLU mission and organizational priorities. The tech team strives to ensure the ACLU leads by example in the ethical use of technology by ensuring privacy and security standards are maintained, directional insights are used to inform programming and business strategy, best-in-class products are designed to get the ACLU message out into the world and grow the ACLU supporter base, as well as to help steward high standards for algorithmic fairness, accountability, and transparency.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Reporting to the Head of Engineering, the DevOps Engineering Manager will provide technical leadership and operational oversight for the DevOps function, overseeing a team responsible for shared infrastructure and operational enablement across data, analytics, and product engineering teams. This role partners closely with cross-functional leaders to align on priorities, manage tradeoffs, and ensure that infrastructure, deployment practices, and platform operations scale sustainably alongside growing security, reliability, and experimentation demands.

The ideal candidate is a systems-oriented engineering leader who combines hands-on technical expertise with pragmatic people management to build and scale reliable and secure mission-critical infrastructure. They will lead DevOps engineers while also contributing directly to the architectural design and incident response needs of the products and tools used in the ecosystem. They are comfortable partnering cross-functionally with multiple discipline stakeholders, to align DevOps strategy with the mission of the ACLU, navigating ambiguity in requirements, competing priorities, early risk mitigation, and scalable operating practices.

YOUR DAY TO DAY

• Provide direct people management and individualized support to a team of skilled DevOps engineers, fostering their continued growth and impact
• Actively prioritize DevOps work across steady-state operations and major initiatives, managing team capacity and clearly surfacing risks, constraints, and tradeoffs to engineering leadership
• Own cross-functional coordination for DevOps work, communicating workplans, sequencing, dependencies, and progress updates to partner teams
• Translate large, ambiguous initiatives into actionable plans by breaking work into well-scoped phases, sequencing execution, and tracking delivery
• Provide technical and architectural leadership for infrastructure and platform decisions, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, and aligned with organizational standards
• Serve as primary technical liaison to partner teams in IT and InfoSec, clarifying responsibility boundaries and ensuring alignment on platform strategy, security standards, timelines, and implementation details
• Establish sustainable operational practices, including on-call coverage, incident response, escalation paths, and post-incident learning
• Establish and evolve documentation, standards, and shared tooling to improve reliability, reduce friction, and scale engineering effectiveness
• Recruit, onboard, and develop DevOps team members, contributing to a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing engineering culture
• Advise on resource planning and staffing models to meet current and anticipate future needs of the department

FUTURE ACLU’ERS WILL

• Be committed to advancing the mission of the ACLU
• Center and embed the principles of equity, inclusion and belonging in their work by demonstrating commitment to diversity with an approach that respects and values multiple perspectives
• Be committed to work collaboratively and respectfully toward resolving obstacles and conflicts

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

• Significant experience leading technical projects in a DevOps, SRE, infrastructure, or platform engineering role supporting production systems at scale
• Demonstrated success in leading, coordinating, or directly managing engineers, including responsibilities for planning, prioritization, goal setting, and delivery outcomes
• Hands-on experience deploying, managing, and optimizing production systems on major cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Experience establishing or improving DevOps practices, such as configuration management, monitoring and logging, incident response, and operational reliability
• Experience with one or more server-side languages and frameworks (e.g. Python, Flask, PHP, node.js), with the ability to build or maintain infrastructure automation
• Experience designing, implementing and scaling cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps workflows
• Experience reviewing and contributing to code bases and Infrastructure as Code tools (e.g. Terraform, CDKTF, AWS CDK)
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies (e.g. Docker, ECS)
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., DataDog, New Relic, CloudWatch)
• Experience acting as a technical point of contact and/or escalation point on critical production and/or architecture design challenges
• Experience communicating technical options and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical partners
• Proven ability to operate effectively in environments with ambiguity, competing priorities, and evolving requirements
• Strong people leadership skills, including providing individualized feedback, mentorship, coaching, and support for professional development
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to convey complex technical concepts clearly and concisely

Preferred

• Familiarity with database administration and optimization for production systems (e.g. Redshift, MySQL, MS SQL Server)
• Experience partnering with security teams to implement baseline security controls, infrastructure changes, or secure-by-design practices
• Experience supporting data or analytics workloads, including experimentation or research environments and compute- and storage-intensive systems

COMPENSATION

The ACLU is committed to equity, transparency, and clarity in pay. Consistent with our compensation philosophy, there is a set salary for each role based on geographic work location. The annual salary for this position is $188,816( Level D), reflecting the salary of a position based in New York, NY.  Salaries are subject to a regional pay adjustment if authorization is granted to work outside of the location listed in this posting. This position is subject to a hybrid schedule of 2 days/week or 8 days/month in-office.

For details on our pay structure, please visit: https://www.aclu.org/careers/ACLU_Geographic_Pay_Structure-July_2024.pdf

WHY THE ACLU

For over 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Whether it’s ending mass incarceration, achieving full equality for the LGBTQ+ community, establishing new privacy protections for our digital age, or preserving the right to vote or the right to have an abortion, the ACLU takes up the toughest civil liberties cases and issues to defend all people.

We know that great people make a great organization. We value our people and know that what we offer is essential not just their work, but to their overall well-being.

At the ACLU, we offer a broad range of benefits, which include:

• Time away to focus on the things that matter with a generous paid time-off policy
• Focus on your well-being with comprehensive healthcare benefits (including medical, dental and vision coverage, parental leave, gender affirming care & fertility treatment)
• Plan for your retirement with 401k plan and employer match
• We support employee growth and development through annual professional development funds, internal professional development programs and workshops

OUR COMMITMENT TO ACCESSIBILITY, EQUITY, DIVERSITY & INCLUSION

Accessibility, equity, diversity and inclusion are core values of the ACLU and central to our work to advance liberty, equality, and justice for all. For us diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion are not just check-the-box activities, but a chance for us to make long-term meaningful change.  We are a community committed to learning and growth, humility and grace, transparency and accountability. We believe in a collective responsibility to create a culture of belonging for all people within our organization – one that respects and embraces difference; treats everyone equitably; and empowers our colleagues to do the best work possible. We are as committed to anti-oppression, anti-ableism, and anti-racism internally as we are externally. Because whether we’re in the courts or in the office, we believe ‘We the People’ means all of us.

With this commitment in mind, we strongly encourage applications from all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, marital status, citizenship, disability, veteran status and record of arrest or conviction, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

The ACLU is committed to providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If you are a qualified individual with a disability and need assistance applying online, please email [email protected] . If you are selected for an interview, you will receive additional information regarding how to request an accommodation for the interview process.

The Department of Education has determined that employment in this position at the ACLU does not qualify for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.