[Hiring] Director of Technical Operations @Deque Systems Inc

Role Description

Deque is seeking a Director of Technical Operations . You will own the infrastructure that Deque's products run on, and you will still have your hands on it.

Deque's products help organizations make the digital world accessible to people with disabilities. Those products run in our AWS environment and inside our customers' networks, and many of them are load-bearing for our customers' own compliance obligations. When our infrastructure is slow or unavailable, their work stops.

You'll lead a small, capable systems operations team — small enough that you'll be in the terminal yourself, not just in the roadmap doc. We want someone with the judgment and scope of a director who still wants to do the work: debug the failing deploy, write the Terraform, run the postmortem. If you've been looking for the step where you get real ownership without giving up hands-on engineering, this is that step.

Primary Responsibilities

• Product infrastructure and reliability
• Our AWS production environment: the infrastructure behind every Deque SaaS product, defined as code and deployed through pipelines your team owns
• Availability, performance, and capacity against our published customer commitments
• Incident command for major events, and a blameless postmortem process
• Backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity
• AWS cost visibility and savings work
• Manage the team to achieve 99.99% uptime
• Managing changes, including releases with gates

• Internal IT and business systems
• Administration and integration of the systems Deque runs on
• Vendor relationships for those systems
• Identity and access management across our tooling
• End-user IT operations

• On-premises customer deployments
• Installation and upgrade of Deque products in customer environments

• Security, compliance, and risk
• The operations half of maintaining our ISO-27001 certification
• Meet the customer commitments for SLAs for remediating vulnerabilities
• Operational support for initiatives led by our Director of Security
• Data handling practices consistent with GDPR

• Team and practice
• Hiring, developing, and retaining the systems operations team
• Scaling the team's capabilities ahead of customer growth
• Documented runbooks, change management, and operational standards
• Accountability for the accessibility of the internal tools
• A practical plan for using AI in operations

What success looks like in your first year

• You understand our environment well enough to have found the things that worry you
• Off-hours coverage and escalation are less frequent and more efficient
• Our ISO-27001 audit is uneventful
• The team has capacity it didn't have before, through automation
• The IT costs are well understood, optimized and constantly monitored
• Met all SLA’s and SLO’s within acceptable bounds
• Formulated and executed plans to improve highest risk areas in your control

Requirements

• 7+ years in infrastructure, SRE, or IT operations with steadily growing responsibility
• Deep hands-on, recent AWS experience
• Infrastructure as code in production (Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK, or similar)
• Containers and orchestration (EKS, ECS, Docker, Kubernetes)
• CI/CD pipelines you've built or substantially rebuilt
• Observability and incident response experience
• Experience in an organization with an active customer base
• Working knowledge of GDPR obligations
• Clear communication with non-technical audiences

Preferred Skills

• FedRAMP or StateRAMP experience
• SOC 2 Type II, VPAT / Section 508 / EN 301 549, or US state privacy regimes
• Experience deploying and supporting software in customer-controlled environments
• Background in accessibility, assistive technology, or disability inclusion
• Google Cloud or Azure hands-on experience

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Remote work flexibility
• Comprehensive health benefits
• 401(k) plan with company match
• Professional development opportunities

Company Description

Deque (pronounced dee-cue) is a web accessibility software and services company, and our mission is Digital Equality. We believe everyone, regardless of their ability, should have equal access to the information, services, applications, and everything else on the web.

We work with enterprise-level businesses and organizations to ensure that their sites and mobile apps are accessible. With over 475,000 extensions installed and over 5,000 audit projects completed, Deque is the industry standard.

Job Location

Remote

How to Apply

Apply by submitting your resume and a cover letter.

• Explain your interest in joining Deque and how you align with our Core Values
• Depict key attributes that differentiate you as a candidate

Deque is committed to providing Equal Employment Opportunities. Reference and background checks will be required. The expected salary range is $130,000K–$160,000K but is subject to change based on the skills, abilities, and experience of each candidate.

Thank you for your interest in joining our exciting company!