DevOps Engineer - L4

Robots and Pencils

About The Position

At Robots & Pencils, we build meaningful, scalable digital products that solve real business problems. We're looking for a DevOps/Backend Engineer (Level 4) to own infrastructure, CI/CD, and backend services for a large-scale platform serving a major public university. You will be responsible for maintaining and evolving a multi-repo AWS serverless architecture spanning Lambda functions, Step Functions, DynamoDB, API Gateway, SQS, CloudFront, and containerized services running on ECR — all provisioned through Terraform. This is not a greenfield project. You'll be joining a mature, production system with real users depending on it daily. The platform orchestrates complex business workflows through event-driven serverless pipelines, integrating with multiple external enterprise APIs and internal microservices. You'll work closely with backend and frontend engineers to keep this system reliable, observable, and shipping safely across multiple environments. By joining us, you leverage our Advanced AWS Partnership and the highly exclusive AWS Patterns Partnership, a distinction held by only 11 companies worldwide out of 190,000.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software engineering experience
Deep hands-on experience with AWS serverless services: Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB, SQS, CloudFront, ECR
Strong proficiency writing and maintaining Terraform at scale
Production experience with CI/CD pipeline design and operation (Jenkins preferred)
Solid understanding of containerization (Docker) and image registry management (ECR)
Experience with multi-environment promotion strategies and deployment safety patterns

Nice To Haves

Experience with AWS Step Functions orchestration patterns (parallel, retry, catch, map states)
Experience integrating with legacy enterprise systems and third-party APIs
Experience with EdTech platforms or student information systems

Responsibilities

Develop and maintain Node.js and Python Lambda functions powering REST APIs, data aggregation, and business logic
Build and optimize Step Function workflows orchestrating multi-service operations
Integrate with external enterprise APIs and internal microservices, handling authentication, rate limiting, and error propagation
Implement deferred processing patterns using SQS for handling concurrent and long-running operations
Own and evolve Terraform modules provisioning API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, Step Functions, SQS, CloudFront, and ECR across multiple AWS accounts
Manage multi-account AWS environments with proper IAM boundaries, secrets management (Vault), and S3 state backends
Design and implement infrastructure changes that support zero-downtime deployments and safe rollback strategies
Maintain and optimize Docker image builds and ECR lifecycle policies for containerized services
Own Jenkins pipelines that build, test, and promote artifacts through staged environments with manual approval gates
Improve build reliability, speed, and developer feedback loops across multiple repositories
Implement and maintain pre-commit hooks, automated testing gates, and lint/type-check enforcement
Coordinate production deployments following established release procedures
Build monitoring, alerting, and logging infrastructure for a distributed serverless system
Troubleshoot production issues spanning API Gateway, Lambda cold starts, Step Function timeouts, and DynamoDB throttling
Establish and maintain SLOs for critical user-facing workflows
Improve error handling and retry strategies across event-driven workflows

Benefits

Work on a production platform that directly impacts real users at scale
Operate within a mature, multi-repo AWS serverless architecture with real complexity
Collaborate with experienced engineers across backend, frontend, and infrastructure disciplines
Grow within a globally recognized AWS partner ecosystem with access to cutting-edge cloud practices
Influence DevOps culture, tooling, and reliability standards across the engineering organization

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