The Role
Director of DevOps
Ascent is a leading provider of innovative financial products and student support services that enable more students to access education and achieve academic and economic success. Everything Ascent offers is designed with the best-in-class teams and technology to increase every student's ability to plan, pay, and succeed in their education and career. Ascent's planning tools and financing resources are co-created by students for those in college, graduate school, and career training programs. Ascent offers financial wellness education, student success services, and one-on-one and digital career coaching that put students' academic and professional goals within reach. Ascent has been widely recognized for its strong culture – named “Best Places to Work” by the San Diego Business Journal for the past 5 years – and as an industry leader – named “Best Student Loan” by NerdWallet for the past 3 years.
Description
We are looking for a Director of DevOps who is both a strategic leader and an active contributor. This role is responsible for defining our DevOps strategy, leading a small but impactful team, and personally contributing to the design and operation of our CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure, and monitoring systems. You will partner with engineering, security, and product teams to ensure our systems are secure, reliable, scalable, and fast.
This is a roll-up-your-sleeves leadership role for someone who wants to guide the organization while staying deeply engaged in execution.
Responsibilities
Execution & Implementation
Security & Compliance
Collaboration
Qualifications
Bonus Experience
Competitive pay with bonus, and comprehensive benefits package that includes, but not limited to:
Ascent is a leading provider of innovative financial products and student support services that enable more students to access education and achieve academic and economic success. Everything Ascent offers is designed with the best-in-class teams and technology to increase every student's ability to plan, pay, and succeed in their education and career. Ascent's planning tools and financing resources are co-created by students for those in college, graduate school, and career training programs. Ascent offers financial wellness education, student success services, and one-on-one and digital career coaching that put students' academic and professional goals within reach. Ascent has been widely recognized for its strong culture – named “Best Places to Work” by the San Diego Business Journal for the past 5 years – and as an industry leader – named “Best Student Loan” by NerdWallet for the past 3 years.
Description
We are looking for a Director of DevOps who is both a strategic leader and an active contributor. This role is responsible for defining our DevOps strategy, leading a small but impactful team, and personally contributing to the design and operation of our CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure, and monitoring systems. You will partner with engineering, security, and product teams to ensure our systems are secure, reliable, scalable, and fast.
This is a roll-up-your-sleeves leadership role for someone who wants to guide the organization while staying deeply engaged in execution.
Responsibilities
Leadership & Strategy
- Define and drive the DevOps roadmap aligned with company goals.
- Build and mentor a high-performing DevOps team.
- Establish and enforce best practices in infrastructure as code (IaC), CI/CD, and cloud operations.
- Work with leadership to ensure alignment across engineering, security, and product.
Execution & Implementation
- Own and improve our deployment pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, AWS, or similar).
- Design and manage cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) with Terraform, or similar tools.
- Set up and manage logging, monitoring, and alerting systems (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus, ELK, etc.).
- Improve incident response and reliability engineering practices (SRE).
Security & Compliance
- Partner with security to support compliance (SOC2, ISO 27001, etc.).
- Implement secure CI/CD practices and secrets management.
- Ensure infrastructure is hardened and kept up to date.
Collaboration
- Work closely with software engineers to ensure fast, reliable, and scalable deployments.
- Serve as a bridge between infrastructure and application teams.
- Collaborate on capacity planning, system architecture, and cost optimization.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of DevOps/SRE/Platform Engineering experience.
- 3+ years in a leadership or management role.
- Strong experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Expert-level knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure).
- Proficiency in IaC tools (Terraform, CloudFormation).
- Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
- Strong understanding of networking, Linux, and distributed systems.
- Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills.
Bonus Experience
- Experience in a regulated industry (e.g., healthcare, finance).
- Background in application performance tuning and cost optimization.
- Familiarity with GitOps practices.
Competitive pay with bonus, and comprehensive benefits package that includes, but not limited to:
- Compensation includes a base salary of $165,000 - $185,000 commensurate with experience, plus bonus and options.
- Company Stock Options
- 401(k) + Company Match
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Annual HSA contribution of $1,600
- Life insurance, disability, and critical illness
- 14 Paid Holidays! Eleven (11) + Two (2) Community Days + Your Birthday!
- Snacks and drinks in the office
- Tuition reimbursement program
- Generous paid leave policies
- $2,000 Vacation Incentive Plan after 3 years + $1,000 Sabbatical Day
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The Company
What We Do
Ascent is built around one guiding principle: Student loans should expand possibilities, not limit them. That’s why Ascent created a new private student loan program that gives students more opportunities to qualify for a loan, with or without a cosigner. Ascent loans are originated by Richland State Bank, Member FDIC. Ascent encourages transparency and financial wellness by incorporating financial education into the application process, preserving the notion that an education is an investment where students and families should understand the return on their investment relative to the cost. Ascent offers benefits (such as 1% cash back, scholarships, a Refer a Friend Program, a Rewards Program, and more) as well as free resources that set students and families up for financial success.
