Lead Chef Automation Engineer

Our Purpose Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential. Title and Summary Lead Chef Automation Engineer Overview The Lead Chef Automation Engineer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for designing and building scalable automation solutions for large, hybrid infrastructure environments. This role focuses on creating reusable automation frameworks using Chef, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and DevOps practices to deliver secure, consistent, and self-service infrastructure capabilities. The ideal candidate is a strong DevOps or platform engineer with deep hands-on Chef experience who enjoys building automation solutions at scale rather than performing manual infrastructure operations. Key Responsibilities Design, develop, and maintain Chef cookbooks, recipes, Policyfiles, and automation frameworks across cloud and on-premises environments. Build and maintain Chef Automate capabilities for configuration management, compliance, reporting, and fleet management. Develop reusable automation libraries, templates, and patterns that standardize infrastructure configuration and provisioning. Integrate automation with CI/CD pipelines, secrets management, artifact repositories, APIs, and governance controls. Build automated testing and validation using Test Kitchen, InSpec, ChefSpec, and related tools. Partner with cloud, platform, security, and SRE teams to establish configuration baselines, security standards, and compliance policies. Develop and support Infrastructure as Code using technologies such as Terraform, CloudFormation, and ARM/Bicep. Troubleshoot complex automation and configuration issues across hybrid environments. Contribute to broader platform engineering capabilities, including self-service infrastructure, GitOps, and automated remediation. Help establish engineering standards, reusable automation patterns, and platform architecture. Required Qualifications Strong experience in DevOps, platform engineering, infrastructure automation, or configuration management. Deep hands-on experience with Chef Infra, including cookbook development, Policyfiles, Test Kitchen, and InSpec. Experience supporting large-scale configuration management environments using Chef Server, Chef Automate, or similar technologies. Strong understanding of Linux, operating system configuration, hardening, and lifecycle management. Experience working across cloud and on-premises infrastructure, including AWS, Azure, GCP, VMware, or Hyper-V. Strong scripting or programming skills with Ruby, Python, Bash, or PowerShell, with Ruby particularly relevant to Chef. Experience integrating automation into CI/CD environments such as GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, or Azure DevOps. Strong understanding of Git-based development, testing, code review, and version-control practices. Ability to diagnose and resolve complex infrastructure and automation problems. Preferred Qualifications Experience with Chef Habitat and/or Chef Automate. Experience with Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code platforms. Familiarity with policy-as-code technologies such as OPA, Conftest, or Sentinel. Experience with security hardening, compliance automation, or CIS benchmarks. Exposure to Kubernetes, Helm, and container platforms. Familiarity with observability technologies such as Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk, or ELK. Experience inte