Senior DevOps Engineer
About The Position
Globus is a sustainable, non-profit unit within The University of Chicago that develops and operates cloud-based software and platform services supporting scientific research worldwide. The Globus Operations team is a 4–5 person group responsible for the cloud infrastructure behind a research-computing platform used by hundreds of institutions. The platform combines AWS-hosted orchestration services with installable applications and provides identity and access management, data transfer and sharing, and task automation as SaaS and PaaS. As a senior member of the team, you will integrate software development and operational best practices across Globus services and AWS infrastructure. The team manages an AWS Organization with roughly thirty production accounts, a machine-image pipeline, self-hosted monitoring, centralized security logging, and in-house compliance and security automation. These systems are managed as code using Python, Bash, Terraform, CloudFormation, and Ansible. The role involves collaborative and independent work on complex projects, sometimes with minimal guidance, and embedding with software engineering teams to provide operational and infrastructure guidance. The position focuses on designing, building, securing, deploying, and operating cloud infrastructure and services. It includes production operations, incident response, participation in an on-call rotation, and serving as a technical resource for engineering and user-support teams. The role is an individual-contributor position with 37.5 scheduled weekly hours. Remote work is available, with occasional required attendance at in-person meetings.
Requirements
- A college or university degree in a related field.
- 5–7 years of work experience in a related job discipline.
- Strong experience operating AWS at scale, including IAM, VPC, EC2 and Auto Scaling Groups, ECS, S3, RDS, Route 53, Lambda, Systems Manager, and CloudWatch, including cross-account work in a multi-account AWS Organization.
- Experience building infrastructure as code with Terraform, including modules, remote state, provider upgrades, and reconciling drift against live environments.
- Experience automating infrastructure in Python using boto3 and maintainable, reusable libraries, and in Bash.
- Experience building Amazon machine images and the instances they run on, Docker containers, and CI/CD tooling.
- Linux administration and troubleshooting across Ubuntu and RPM-based distributions, including systemd, syslog/rsyslog, storage, and SSH/sudo configuration.
- Experience with networking, firewalls, routing, DNS, web servers, and TLS.
- Experience with check-based monitoring, particularly self-hosted Nagios/NRPE.
- Experience with incident management and on-call practice using a platform such as PagerDuty, and writing root-cause analyses.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including clear technical documentation and post-incident analyses.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including systematic troubleshooting of distributed systems.
- Excellent organizational skills, attention to detail, and ability to prioritize and manage workload to meet critical milestones and deadlines.
- Ability to work independently and as a team member, take end-to-end ownership with minimal supervision, and switch between long-term engineering projects and time-sensitive operational work.
- Receptiveness to feedback and willingness to learn and embrace continuous improvement.
- Experience with software development fundamentals, including code review, automated testing, and static analysis, and integrating development and deployment frameworks with monitoring, operations, and orchestration for secure, large-scale public-cloud applications.
Nice To Haves
- Experience maintaining and incrementally retiring legacy CloudFormation.
- Experience with AWS CodeBuild and GitHub Actions.
- Experience with self-hosted Nagios/NRPE monitoring.
- Experience using incident-management and on-call platforms such as PagerDuty.
Responsibilities
- Participate in defining and documenting cloud infrastructure architecture for networking, monitoring, logging, security, backup, and deployment across production and development environments.
- Design systems and tools, identify technical improvements, and review and test solutions to ensure standards are met.
- Develop, test, document, and maintain software and infrastructure as code for deploying and operating Globus cloud services using Python, Bash, Terraform, and CloudFormation.
- Contribute to shared internal libraries and expand automated test coverage of operational tooling.
- Maintain and evolve the machine-image and deployment supply chain, including Packer-built AMIs produced through AWS CodeBuild and published through SSM Parameter Store with KMS encryption and cross-account sharing.
- Maintain existing monitoring and alerting systems, including self-hosted Nagios/NRPE, CloudWatch alarms, and PagerDuty routing, and assist with migration to Prometheus.
- Contribute to Globus security plans, controls, monitoring, and reporting.
- Extend continuous-compliance automation, operate intrusion detection and endpoint-protection tooling, and maintain hardened machine images.
- Administer IAM roles, policies, and cross-account trust across the AWS Organization.
- Deploy, operate, and monitor production Globus services for high availability.
- Participate in an on-call rotation, lead incident response, and author root-cause analyses.
- Identify recurring operational toil and eliminate it through automation and improved defaults.
- Provide technical consulting and support to engineering, user-support, and other team members on operational issues and troubleshooting.
- Design new systems, features, and tools; solve complex problems; and identify opportunities for technical improvement and performance optimization.
- Review and test code to ensure appropriate standards are met.
- Apply technical knowledge of existing and emerging technologies, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Perform other related work as needed.
Benefits
- Eligible employees may access health, retirement, and paid-time-off benefits; specific offerings are described in the Benefits Guidebook.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
