Senior Manager, Software Development and Automation

5C Data Centers

Join the Future of Digital Infrastructure

Are you a passionate Senior Manager, Software Development and Automation looking to make a meaningful impact? We're building the next generation of digital infrastructure powering hyperscalers, AI innovation, and high-performance computing across North America.

Job Title: Senior Manager, Software Development and Automation

Department: Cloud Operations

Location: OH, USA

Work Arrangement: Remote

Salary Range: $180,000 – $220,000 USD

Role Summary

We're looking for a Senior Manager, Software Development and Automation who is equal parts architect and builder. You'll need to see the target state, a proactive monitoring culture, a scalable automation platform, and the infrastructure foundation for AI, and be able to articulate and sell that vision to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Just as importantly, you'll need to know how to get there: breaking a multi-year vision into a practical, bottom-up sequence of steps a team can actually execute. You'll build out automation and configuration management practices, help stand up the platform foundation for new and AI-enabled products, and instill DevOps practices as the way 5C operates, not just within this team. Remaining legacy systems are kept stable through light-touch oversight, not a major modernization push.

How We Work at 5C

Our core values guide how we collaborate, make decisions, support one another, and serve our customers. We're looking for people who embrace them and help us build something great.

What You Will Do

Team & Technical Leadership

• Lead and develop a high-performing DevOps and software engineering team while remaining actively involved in technical execution, establishing scalable standards, and partnering with Product and Operations to drive roadmap priorities and technical direction.
• Own the team's operational excellence by balancing short-term needs with long-term investments, leading incident management and on-call practices, and ensuring reliable, maintainable, and standardized solutions through strong technical governance.

Vision, Architecture & Automation Enablement

• Own and drive the technical vision for 5C's automation and AI infrastructure, translating long-term strategy into practical, incremental roadmaps that deliver measurable business value.
• Champion DevOps, automation, and proactive monitoring practices across the organization, serving as a technical leader who enables teams company-wide to adopt standardized tools, processes, and operational best practices.

Platform Automation & Reliability

• Build and mature infrastructure automation capabilities by implementing configuration management, version-controlled infrastructure changes, and repeatable deployment processes that improve consistency and operational efficiency.
• Drive adoption of event-driven automation, self-healing systems, and comprehensive monitoring and observability practices to reduce manual effort, increase reliability, and enable proactive infrastructure management

Platform Foundation for AI & New Initiatives

• Establish a scalable, production-ready infrastructure foundation by implementing standardized platforms for orchestration, GitOps deployments, monitoring, security, certificate management, and disaster recovery, ensuring new environments are deployed with consistency and reliability.
• Drive automation, governance, and engineering support for AI and emerging workloads, enabling new initiatives to launch on mature infrastructure platforms while accelerating adoption of standardized operational practices.

Legacy Systems: Light-Touch Stewardship

• Keep remaining legacy infrastructure stable, secure, and supportable with minimal ongoing investment, as the team's focus shifts to automation and AI-enabled platforms.
• Make pragmatic calls on when a legacy issue needs real engineering time versus when it can be contained or deprioritized.

What You Bring

• 5+ years experience as a hands-on leader of a DevOps, infrastructure, or platform engineering team, combining people management with real technical depth.
• Demonstrated ability to define and articulate a multi-year technical vision, and to sell it convincingly to both engineering and executive audiences.
• Track record of turning that kind of vision into a practical, bottom-up execution plan, not just architecting on a whiteboard.
• 10+ years experience instilling DevOps practices and a proactive monitoring culture in an organization that didn't already have them, not just operating one that did.
• 10+ years experience standing up or scaling configuration management and automation practices in an environment carrying meaningful technical debt.
• Working knowledge of container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes), GitOps deployment workflows, and modern monitoring/observability tooling.
• Solid infrastructure/solutions architecture experience: able to design target-state architecture and a practical migration path, not just operate what already exists.
• Good judgement about where to invest limited engineering time, and comfort communicating those trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience supporting AI/ML infrastructure or GPU-backed workloads.
• Experience with legacy virtualization, storage, or cloud orchestration platforms (e.g., XenServer/KVM, CloudStack).
• Familiarity with bare-metal infrastructure provisioning and certificate management at scale.
• Database modernization experience.
• Experience in a data center, colocation, or cloud infrastructure operator environment.

Why Join 5C Data Centers?

At 5C, we believe great people build great companies. You'll build a rewarding career while helping shape the future of digital infrastructure - one of the fastest-growing industries in the world.

Career Growth

Build a rewarding career in one of the world's fastest-growing industries.

Industry Leadership

Help power the infrastructure behind AI and high-performance computing.

Entrepreneurial Culture

Your ideas matter - we empower employees to help shape our future.

Comprehensive Rewards

Competitive pay plus meaningful, lasting impact on the work you do.

Life at 5C

We're more than a workplace - we're a team of builders, innovators, and problem-solvers united by a shared purpose: creating infrastructure that powers the technologies transforming our world. Your voice matters here, and we encourage fresh ideas at every level.

5C Data Centers is an equal opportunity employer.

We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive. 5C evaluates qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability status, or any other legally protected characteristic.