QA Platform Engineer

Black Canyon Consulting•Bethesda, MD

About The Position

Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) is hiring a QA Platform Engineer (DevOps) to support the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health. The role is full time and may be performed onsite at NCBI in Bethesda, Maryland, and/or remotely. The position is part of NCBI's Platforms team, which develops and continuously improves DevSecOps, DataOps, and observability platforms; maintains shared tools and libraries; evaluates technologies and practices; supports developers adopting platforms, tools, architectural patterns, and best practices; and provides automated solutions for compliance with federal application security standards. The team practices Agile development and continuous improvement. Within the Platform section, the Compliance and QA team builds compliance pipelines with quality gates, automatically gathers application-quality metrics across NCBI's application portfolio, and provides project-based QA services. The role combines software development, test automation, and implementation of frameworks and utilities supporting deployment, testing, and monitoring. NCBI's platforms use containerization, Kubernetes, GitOps, and open interfaces, with deployments across multiple clouds and on-premises environments.

Requirements

Strong coding skills in at least one programming language.
Proven software development skills using modern computing languages such as Python, JavaScript, and Java.
Adequate Linux command-line skills.
A B.S. in a STEM field such as engineering, computer science, mathematics, or physics, or equivalent industry experience in systems engineering.

Nice To Haves

Experience with web technologies and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD).
Sysadmin-level skills.
Familiarity with build tools and web, RPC, or other frameworks.
Experience with coding and architecture design patterns.
Knowledge of OpenShift, Anthos, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), or Hashicorp Nomad.
Knowledge of observability tools such as Prometheus, EFK, TIGK, DataDog, Sensu, Jaeger, Sentry, OpsGenie, or PagerDuty.
Knowledge of service mesh technologies such as Istio or Linkerd.
Knowledge of Kafka, Apache Pulsar, RabbitMQ, Amazon Kinesis, Apache Flume, Apache Storm, Apache Spark Streaming, or Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
Experience with GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, TeamCity, Artifactory, or equivalent tools for Git source control, CI/CD pipelines, and artifact lifecycle management.
Knowledge of secret-management tools such as Hashicorp Vault, CyberArk, Azure Key Vault, Google Cloud Secret Manager, or equivalent.
Experience with Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, C++, Kotlin, Scala, Golang, or Rust.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain compliance pipelines with built-in quality gates.
Continuously and automatically gather application-quality metrics across the enterprise-wide application portfolio.
Provide QA services on a project basis.
Automate tests using tools such as Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright.
Implement frameworks and utilities to support deployment, testing, and monitoring.
Help developers adopt platforms, tools, architectural patterns, and best practices.
Contribute to the development and continuous improvement of DevSecOps, DataOps, and observability platforms, common tools, and libraries.