Senior Director, DevOps & Application Security - J.D. Power

Job Description:

Title: Sr. Director, DevOps & AppSec

Location: Remote – USA, Canada

Reports to: SVP, Engineering

Vacancy : New vacancy

The Role:

We are hiring a Sr. Director, DevOps to lead the global DevOps function at JD Power. Reporting directly to the SVP of Engineering, you will own the strategy, execution, and day-to-day operation of the platforms, pipelines, and tooling that our engineering and data organizations rely on to ship safely and quickly.

The Impact You Will Have in This Role:

This is a player-coach role. You will lead a small, senior team with global responsibility across our cloud footprint, CI/CD, observability, and developer experience. You should be equally comfortable setting multi-year strategy with executive leadership and rolling up your sleeves in a pull request or an incident bridge.

Success in this role looks like a leveraged, well-instrumented platform that lets product engineering teams move faster with fewer escalations, a measurably stronger reliability and security posture, and a high-trust DevOps team that other engineers actively want to work with.

What You’ll Be Doing in This Role:

• Set and execute the DevOps and platform engineering strategy across cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, secrets, and developer self-service.
• Lead, coach, and grow a high-performing team of DevOps engineers — including hiring, leveling, performance management, and succession planning.
• Operate as a player-coach: stay close to the technical work, contribute to architecture and code reviews, and step into incidents when needed.
• Partner with Security, Data, Product Engineering, and Architecture to embed security and compliance into the SDLC (DevSecOps).
• Own the cloud cost (FinOps) posture for the platforms under your scope and drive continuous, measurable improvement.
• Make and defend build-vs-buy decisions across the DevOps tooling stack; manage key vendor relationships.
• Be a thoughtful integrator of AI into engineering workflows where it produces real leverage.

Qualifications of this Role:

• 12+ years in software engineering, infrastructure, or DevOps, with 8+ years in management and time leading distributed or global teams.
• Track record of building and operating modern cloud platforms at scale — AWS strongly preferred; multi-cloud or hybrid experience a plus.
• Deep, current technical fluency in CI/CD, infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent), container orchestration (Kubernetes or equivalent), observability, and secrets management.
• Strong DevSecOps instincts — you’ve shipped real security improvements without grinding engineering velocity to a halt.
• Experience owning compliance work end-to-end (SOC 2, PCI, GDPR, HIPAA, or similar) in partnership with Security and Audit.
• Demonstrated ability to design for le