Staff / Principal DevOps Engineer (New York)

Staff / Principal DevOps EngineerLocation: New York City | HybridDepartment: AI Platform & Infrastructure TeamReports to: Vangie Shue – Principal Engineering Manager

About AppGate

AppGate secures and protects an organization’s most valuable assets with its high performance Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution and Cyber Advisory Services. AppGate ZTNA is the only direct‑routed Zero Trust solution built for peak performance, superior protection and seamless interoperability. AppGate Cyber Advisory Services harden your security posture and ensure business continuity. AppGate safeguards Fortune 500 enterprises and government agencies worldwide.

About the Role

As we expand our platform, we are standing up a new AI Platform & Infrastructure team: the engine room of AppGate’s AI strategy. This team owns the infrastructure layer that every next‑generation security capability is built on, from network observability to AI‑driven threat detection and the secure operation of emerging Agentic AI systems. We need a Staff or Principal DevOps Engineer to design and build the deployment vehicle of our cloud and AI infrastructure, set the standards the rest of the team will build on, and grow the surrounding engineers into a capable platform team. You will make foundational decisions around cloud architecture, IaC conventions, CI/CD, observability, and on‑call, codify them so they scale, and mentor a team that is still developing deep DevOps expertise.

Key Responsibilities

• Build the Platform: design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines and self‑service tooling from a greenfield starting point, enabling product teams to build, test, and deploy safely and quickly with automated guardrails, rollbacks, and paved paths.
• Stand up and operate container orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes, including self‑managed, stateful technologies such as Kafka and Elasticsearch, running reliably in production.
• Infrastructure as Code: automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration management using Terraform and Helm, with reusable modules and patterns others can safely build on.
• Observability from day one: instrument monitoring, logging, and alerting across services and infrastructure using Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK stack; define SLOs, error budgets, and operational health metrics the team will trust.
• Security Best Practices: implement security best practices across infrastructure and deployment workflows—including secrets management, least‑privilege access, certificate and key management, vulnerability remediation, and secure‑by‑default configuration.
• Mentor and level up the team: coach engineers who are strong but new to DevOps/infra, run design reviews, pair on hard problems, write the docs and playbooks, and deliberately transfer expertise so the team can own and evolve the platform without depending on any one person.
• Operationalize AI/ML: build the MLOps foundation for AppGate’s AI products—model serving and inference pipelines, model deployment, versioning, and drift monitoring, and the experiment‑tracking and lifecycle tooling (MLflow, Kubeflow, SageMaker) that lets data scientists ship models safely and repeatably.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally: partner with data scientists, product teams, and leadership to align platform investment with AppGate’s strategic vision.

Required Qualifications

• Extensive DevOps, platform, infrastructure, or SRE engineering experience with a track record of operating production systems at scale (8+ years for Staff, 12+ years for Principal).
• Hands‑on experience standing up infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines in a greenfield or early‑stage environment and making foundational decisions.
• Observability expertise implementing Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or the ELK stack, along with SLO and error‑budget practice.
• Security mindset: familiarity with implementing secrets management, vulnerability remediation, and secure‑by‑default design in infrastructure and deployment workflows.
• Engineering craft: fluency in a primary backend language (Python, Go, or similar) and a strong bias toward automation, testing, and reliable, maintainable systems.
• Mentorship & leadership experience: a proven ability to coach and elevate the skills of engineering peers.

Benefits

AppGate offers a comprehensive benefits package, competitive compensation, and opportunities to work on cutting‑edge AI and security solutions in a hybrid, New York City environment.