DevOps Engineer III

Location: Durham, NC

ABOUT US

Victra is Verizon's largest premium retailer in the United States. We thrive on collaboration, innovation, and performance. Our mission is to "Connect technology to life in a trustworthy, fun, and profitable way". We work closely with Verizon and our brand partners to deliver exceptional product offerings, promotions, and campaigns that drive in-store traffic and revenue.

JOB DESCRIPTION:

The Senior DevOps Engineer III is a senior technical leader on the Cloud Platform & DevOps team, owning the design and direction of Victra's Azure CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code estate, setting standards that other engineers build against, and serving as the primary technical bridge between DevOps and application development teams. This role operates with significant autonomy, makes architectural decisions that affect multiple teams, and elevates the capability of engineers across the organization. Success requires a results-driven mindset, strong relationship building, strategic thinking, change leadership, and the ability to inspire others through technical expertise and influence. AI is a core part of how this team works, and this role is expected to use it fluently as a force multiplier while maintaining judgment and accountability for the output. Success in this role reflects Victra's core leadership principles including: Results Driven, Strategic Thinking, Relationship Building, Change Management, and Customer Focus.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Operate independently across Victra's Azure DevOps and Azure platform footprint, owning performance and outcomes with a high level of personal accountability. [Results Driven]
• Make architectural decisions on pipelines, Bicep module architecture, branching strategies, environment topology, and release patterns, linking technical decisions to business goals and priorities. [Strategic Thinking]
• Own ambiguous, cross-cutting initiatives spanning multiple application teams, Azure subscriptions, and quarter-plus timelines; prioritize under pressure and remain accountable for commitments and results. [Results Driven]
• Set technical direction for the DevOps function by establishing patterns, standards, and reference implementations that other engineers and application teams adopt, using expertise and influence to build commitment and support. [Inspirational Leadership / Relationship Building]
• Represent DevOps in architecture reviews, security reviews, and cross-functional planning, establishing reciprocal relationships across teams and communicating credibly with engineering leaders and individual developers. [Relationship Building]
• Own the architecture of Azure DevOps YAML pipelines and reusable pipeline templates across the organization, defining what good looks like and driving teams toward scalable standards. [Strategic Thinking / Results Driven]
• Lead the design, refactoring, and governance of the Bicep module library, establishing module boundaries, parameter conventions, target-scope strategy, and versioning approaches across subscriptions and environments. [Strategic Thinking]
• Serve as the embedded technical partner for application development teams, translating platform constraints into developer-friendly patterns and developer needs into platform capabilities. [Customer Focus / Relationship Building]
• Drive measurable improvements in deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (DORA metrics), building the instrumentation needed to demonstrate results. [Results Driven]
• Champion shift-left security practices including IaC scanning, SAST/DAST integration, secret scanning, dependency review, and policy-as-code; partner closely with Security on Azure Policy and Defender posture. [Change Management / Relationship Building]
• Eliminate operational toil through self-service tooling, identifying new ideas and adopting them to improve developer experience and move teams toward more autonomous ways of working. [Change Management]
• Raise the capability of everyone who touches the platform by mentoring developers adopting IaC and CI/CD, coaching future DevOps hires, using PR reviews as teaching opportunities, and creating ADRs, runbooks, and onboarding documentation that allow standards to scale. [Talent Management]
• Lead post-incident reviews focused on systemic fixes and participate in the platform on-call rotation, providing direction and removing obstacles to getting work done. [Results Driven]

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR:

• 7+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, Platform, or Cloud Engineering, with at least 4 years focused on Azure at enterprise scale across multiple subscriptions and environments.
• Comfort using AI coding assistants and agents as a core part of the daily workflow to draft and review Bicep, pipelines, and scripts, accelerate troubleshooting, and produce documentation, paired with the judgment to verify and own the output.
• Deep, demonstrable expertise authoring Azure DevOps YAML pipelines, including multi-stage pipelines, reusable templates, parameterized template libraries, deployment jobs, environments, approvals, and variable group strategy.
• Production-grade Bicep authorship, including modular design, parameter and output discipline, conditional deployments, all target scopes, and integration with deployment stacks or ARM what-if workflows.
• Strong scripting skills for automation, remediation, and tooling in PowerShell (Az and Microsoft Graph PowerShell modules) and Bash; Python is a strong plus.
• Solid command of Git workflows with a clear point of view on branching, PR review, and release strategy at scale.
• Working expertise across Azure core services including Entra ID, Key Vault, Storage, App Service, Functions, AKS or Container Apps, Application Gateway, Front Door, Log Analytics, and Azure Monitor.
• Track record of leading cross-team initiatives and setting standards that others adopted without formal authority, using code, documentation, conversation, personal confidence, expertise, and influence. [Inspirational Leadership / Relationship Building]
• Proven ability to work directly with application developers as a technical peer, understand system design principles, and guide teams toward sound, cost-aware platform decisions. [Customer Focus / Strategic Thinking]
• Demonstrated commitment to developing others through documentation, teaching, feedback, mentoring, and knowledge sharing. [Talent Management]
• Ability to identify opportunities within ambiguity, act without waiting for direction, and maintain accountability for high-quality outcomes. [Results Driven]
• Ability to give and receive direct, respectful feedback, build trust through competence, and collaborate effectively across organizational boundaries. [Relationship Building / Inspirational Leadership]

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Experience with Enterprise Policy as Code (EPAC) or large-scale Azure Policy management.
• Familiarity with GitHub Actions in addition to Azure DevOps, including migration experience.
• Hands-on Kubernetes (AKS) or Azure Container Apps experience.
• Observability tooling experience with Application Insights, Log Analytics KQL, Grafana, or Datadog.
• Microsoft certifications such as AZ-400 (DevOps Engineer Expert), AZ-305 (Solutions Architect Expert), or AZ-104.
• Background in retail, telecom, or another regulated/high-volume enterprise environment.
• Experience integrating DevOps tooling with FinOps practices, including tagging strategy, cost allocation, and budget guardrails.

WHY JOIN US?

• Paid training and career development opportunities.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401k retirement plan.
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Employee discounts on Verizon services.
• Referral bonuses.
• Career pathing opportunities.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer - and celebrate our employees' differences, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or Veteran status. Different makes us better.