Director of Technical Operations

Career Fulfillment & Culture

People come to work for Deque because of what we do: enable businesses and organizations to make their sites and apps accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. The personal fulfillment employees feel here is unparalleled. In addition to the altruistic nature of our jobs, the organizational structure is extremely flat and welcoming. Women-owned and operated, Deque CEO Preety Kumar is internationally revered for her down-to-earth personality and work ethic. Deque's core values are central to our culture of customer satisfaction. Do you share them?

• Innovation with results that matter
• Deliver what you promise
• Can-do attitude
• Open, direct & respectful communications
• We care deeply
• We practice humility

At Deque, you’ll work with the best and brightest minds in the industry, sharing best practices, tackling new issues and uncovering new approaches. Accessibility Consultants at Deque also love their jobs because of the support systems in place.

Deque experts regularly contribute to W3C Accessibility Working Groups and collectively hold more CPACC, WAS, & CPWA certifications issued by the IAAP than any accessibility testing company in the world.

Position 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 — and the observability, alerting, and SLO practice that makes those commitments measurable rather than aspirational
• Incident command for major events, and a blameless postmortem process that actually closes its action items
• Backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity, including tested restore procedures and defined recovery objectives
• AWS cost: visibility into where the money goes across production and development, and a standing pipeline of savings work
• Manage the team to achieve 99.99% uptime with the exception of planned maintenance and upgrades
• Managing changes, including releases with gates and maintaining all changes as documented artifacts

Internal IT and business systems

• Administration and integration of the systems Deque runs on — Jira, GitHub, ZenHub, Artifactory, Keycloak, Zendesk, and others
• Vendor relationships for those systems: evaluation, renewals, contract negotiation, and consolidation where it makes sense
• Identity and access management across our tooling, in partnership with Security
• End-user IT operations - managing employee laptops, onboarding/offboarding for the in scope IT and business systems

On-premises customer deployments

• Installation and upgrade of Deque products in customer environments, and the tooling and documentation that make those repeatable rather than bespoke

Security, compliance, and risk

• The operations half of maintaining our ISO-27001 certification: controls, evidence, audit response
• 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 and comparable privacy regimes

Team and practice

• Hiring, developing, and retaining the systems operations team in multiple locations, currently including the US and India; setting the technical bar
• Scaling the team's capabilities ahead of customer growth - this is the strategic core of the job, not an afterthought. Our tooling needs to be materially stronger a year from now than it is today.
• Documented runbooks, change management, and operational standards
• Accountability for the accessibility of the internal tools and admin interfaces you select and configure. Our accessibility experts can help with the evaluations, if you lack experience, our Deque University procurement courses will help you get up to speed.
• A practical plan for using AI in operations: where it genuinely helps, with governance around AI safety, data handling and change safety

What success looks like in your first year

• You understand our environment well enough to have found the things that worry you, and you've told us what they are
• Off-hours coverage and escalation are less frequent and more efficient than when you arrived
• 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

Hours and on-call

• We have follow-the-sun coverage on weekdays. Weekend on-call is limited and centered on planned upgrades and genuine emergencies; you'll share in it alongside your team. We'd rather tell you this now than have you discover it in week three.

Requirements

• 7+ years in infrastructure, SRE, or IT operations with steadily growing responsibility, including at least two years leading engineers
• Deep hands-on, recent (last 18-24 months) AWS experience - not just oversight of someone else's AWS
• 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, not merely inherited
• Observability and incident response: instrumentation, alerting, on-call practice, postmortems
• Experience in an organization with an active customer base and a support function — you've felt the pressure of a customer-facing outage
• Working knowledge of GDPR obligations as they affect infrastructure and data handling
• Clear communication with non-technical audiences, including reporting and dashboards for executives

Preferred Skills

• FedRAMP or StateRAMP experience — the most valuable thing on this list of advantages

• SOC 2 Type II, VPAT / Section 508 / EN 301 549, or US state privacy regimes (CCPA/CPRA)

• Experience deploying and supporting software in customer-controlled environments

• Background in accessibility, assistive technology, or disability inclusion

• Google Cloud or Azure hands on experience

About Deque

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. Join our growing family as we work to make the web a better place for everyone.

Job Location

Remote

How to Apply

Apply by submitting your resume and a cover letter. 

In your 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. The values listed are not intended to guarantee a salary for candidates or current employees.

Thank you for your interest in joining our exciting company!