Principal Software Engineer, DevOps and Tools

Description Invent the future with us. Ampere is a semiconductor design company for a new era, leading the future of computing with an innovative approach to CPU design focused on high-performance, energy efficient AI compute.

As a pioneer in the new frontier of energy efficient high-performance computing, Ampere is part of the Softbank Group of companies driving sustainable computing for AI, Cloud, and edge applications.

Join us at Ampere and work alongside a passionate and growing team - we’d love to have you apply!

About The Role We’re hiring an individual contributor with strong technical depth who will act as a technical leader, architect, and planner for our DevOps, Tools, and Infrastructure team. This role is hands‑on (roughly 60-70% coding/engineering) with clear technical leadership responsibilities (standards, design direction, code reviews, mentoring, and cross‑team technical alignment) as well as 30-40% leadership and organizational responsibilities.

What You’ll Achieve Contribute to our global GitLab and Python-based CI/CD infrastructure

• Contribute to the end-to-end design and evolution Ampere’s GitLab CI infrastructure across a global organization of developers.
• Contribute to a global dependency management infrastructure that drives SW development across multiple product lines.
• Instrument pipelines and workflows that enable industry leading SW development practices.
• Develop and maintain production-grade CLIs, services, and tools that orchestrate CI workflows, artifact management, release activities, and developer tooling.
• Create GitLab API/webhook integrations for policy enforcement (e.g., dependency policy checks, MR labeling), automated backports, and pipeline orchestration; build scalable retry and idempotency patterns.
• Build data pipelines that publish pipeline, artifact, traceability, and dependency lineage to various industry standard database technologies (such as Postgres and Neo4J), enabling root-cause analysis, impact assessment, and reproducibility.

Run reliable CI infrastructure at scale

• Provision and manage GitLab Runners and VM fleets for compute-heavy CI workloads using infrastructure as code (Terraform/Ansible); implement autoscaling, isolation, and prewarming to minimize queue times.
• Operate and tune backing services: schema design, migrations, indexing, backups/point-in-time recovery, HA, and performance diagnostics.
• Establish SLIs/SLOs for CI with observability, structured logging, and actionable alerts, lead incident response and postmortems.
• Implement artifact, dependency, and container cache strategies to reduce cycle times while preserving determinism and integrity.
• Perform regular upgrades (GitLab, runners, OS, databases), security patching and hardening, secrets/identity management, and disaster recovery drills; track capacity and cost and forecast growth.

Drive technical leadership and standards

• Author, version, and maintain canonical specifications for processes and tools.
• Lead technical designs and RFCs for CI platform evolution, dependency management policies, and data/reporting architecture; perform deep code reviews and mentor engineers on GitLab, Python, and operational best practices.
• Define standards for data instrumentation and reporting schemas so teams can contribute analytics consistently.
• Champion secure software supply chain practices (pinned digests, SBOMs, attestation/signing) integrated into CI templates.
• Set and evangelize best practices for reproducible builds, ephemeral environments, artifact retention, and change management.

Drive prioritization, scheduling, and scoping of engineering deliverables for the DevOps team

• Translate platform goals and stakeholder requirements into a sequenced, outcome-focused roadmap with clear acceptance criteria, dependencies, and risk mitigation.
• Use data to drive decisions which prioritize by impact to SLIs/OKRs and communicate trade-offs and status to stakeholders.
• Coordinate cross-functional deliveries that span CI, runners/VMs, Postgres/Neo4j, and analytics pipelines; align global teams on integration windows, rollout plans, and rollback strategies.
• Establish change management practices (release notes, staged rollouts, canaries) and ensure documentation/specs remain current as the platform evolves.

About You

• Education & Experience: BS Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or Software Engineering or related technical field & 8 years of related experience in software engineering/DevOps/SRE roles operating CI/CD systems in production environments; or MS degree & 6 years of related experience in software engineering/DevOps/SRE roles operating CI/CD systems in production environments; or PhD & 3 years of related experience in software engineering/DevOps/SRE roles operating CI/CD systems in production environments
• Deep GitLab and GitLab CI expertise: Strong Python for automation and services
• Solid Linux fundamentals.
• Observability and operations: metrics/logs/tracing, Prometheus/Grafana, setting SLOs/SLIs, on‑call/incident response and postmortems.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: leading designs/RFCs, setting engineering standards, mentoring, and owning cross‑team technical deliverables without direct authority.

What We’ll Offer: At Ampere we believe in taking care of our employees and providing a competitive total rewards package that includes base pay, cash long-term incentive, and comprehensive benefits. The full base pay range for this role is between $182,000 and $273,000, except in the San Francisco Bay Area where the range is between $195,000 and $292,000.

Our benefits include health, wellness, and financial programs that support employees through every stage of life.

Benefit Highlights Include

• Premium medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, as well as income protection and a 401K retirement plan, so that you can feel secure in your health and financial future.
• Unlimited Flextime and 10+ paid holidays so that you can embrace a healthy work-life balance.
• A variety of healthy snacks, energizing espresso, and refreshing drinks to keep you fueled and focused throughout the day.

And there is much more than compensation and benefits. At Ampere, we foster an inclusive culture that empowers our employees to do more and grow more. We are excited to share more about our career opportunities with you through the interview process. Our benefits include health, wellness, and financial programs that support employees through every stage of life.

Ampere is an inclusive and equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, citizenship, religion, age, veteran and/or military status, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, physical or mental disability, or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law.