Senior DevOps Engineer - Build / Environment Manager

Stand Together•Arlington, VA

About The Position

Stand Together is a philanthropic community that helps America’s boldest changemakers tackle the root causes of our country’s biggest problems. We provide our partners with access to resources including funding, thought leadership, a network of peers, and a playbook for applying proven principles to transform lives and society. We are seeking a Senior DevOps Lead Engineer to lead and evolve the DevOps function for the Be The People digital ecosystem — a suite of highly visible, public-facing applications. This is a senior individual contributor role with strong technical leadership expectations, responsible for environments, CI/CD pipelines, release readiness, and operational guardrails. This role operates with a high degree of autonomy and judgment, balancing delivery velocity with reliability, security, and long-term maintainability. You will collaborate with software engineers, data engineers, architects, cloud engineers, and product stakeholders to tackle some of society's most pressing challenges.

Requirements

10+ years of relevant DevOps and Cloud Engineering experience — this is a senior-level role not suitable for junior or mid-level candidates
Proven experience operating production systems with real customer and business impact
Minimum 5 years of professional Cloud Engineering background, with deep AWS expertise
CI/CD: GitHub Actions (primary), plus experience with CircleCI, Jenkins, Bamboo, Harness.io, or AWS CodePipeline
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, AWS CDK, Serverless Stack (SST), Ansible Playbooks, or CloudFormation
Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Rancher
Cloud Platforms: AWS (EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Lambda, SQS, SNS, ECS, ECR, Elastic Load Balancers, S3, Amplify, CodeBuild); familiarity with Azure, Google Cloud, and Acquia
CDN & Networking: Cloudflare; understanding of DNS, Custom TCP, SSH, HTTPS, UDP, VPNs, Load Balancing, and Firewalls
Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, ELK Stack, or Graylog
Databases: DocumentDB / MongoDB (operational context); SQL background advantageous
Security: Secure SDLC concepts including secrets management, scanning, and least-privilege access
Languages: Python, PowerShell, JavaScript, or Java (for Lambda and scripting)
Version Control: Git and GitHub
Configuration Management: Ansible, Chef, or Puppet
Project Management, Sprint Planning & Release Planning: Jira and Confluence
Strong judgment and ownership — comfortable saying 'no' or 'not yet' when appropriate
Formal people-management experience is not required; demonstrated technical leadership through influence is expected
Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders around risk and tradeoffs
Comfortable with command-line tools and the Linux/Unix environment
Enthusiasm to contribute to Stand Together's vision and principled approach to solving problems, and a commitment to stewarding our culture , which champions values including transformation and innovation, entrepreneurialism, humility, and respect.

Nice To Haves

AWS or Azure certifications (Certified Developer, DevOps Engineer, Solutions Architect, Data Analytics, or Database)
Experience with regulated or compliance-sensitive environments
Exposure to multi-product or platform organizations
Experience modernizing legacy delivery practices
Background in building and deploying web applications from source code
DevSecOps experience including code analysis, vulnerability management, regulatory compliance, security policy monitoring, to help build a security-aware culture

Responsibilities

Lead the DevOps function end-to-end for Be The People, and contribute to how applications are assembled, tested, released, and operated
Lead creation and lifecycle management of environments, including spinning up new environments and coordinating content and data seeding
Contribute to the design and evolution of platform architecture with an emphasis on scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency
Establish cloud standards and manage cloud operations in cooperation with Cloud Engineering.
Design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions as the primary orchestrator
Establish reusable workflow templates and best practices without introducing unnecessary complexity
Apply Infrastructure-as-Code discipline — including versioning, promotion across environments, and drift prevention — using tools such as Terraform, Terragrunt, CDK, Ansible, or CloudFormation
Develop and debug Python, Ansible Playbooks, Terraform, and other infrastructure-as-code tooling
Own or steward the release management function, acting as a go/no-go checkpoint to ensure required testing has occurred, stakeholder sign-offs are complete, and risks are clearly surfaced
Participate in production incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident learning
Construct a resilient ecosystem capable of quickly restoring services, and participate in developing the disaster recovery playbook for Be The People
Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability for production systems using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, or ELK Stack
Participate in the development, implementation, and automation of security policies
Apply baseline security best practices across infrastructure and pipelines
Apply SRE-inspired practices such as defining SLIs/SLOs and designing systems operable by teams beyond DevOps
Deeply understand CDN configuration (e.g., Cloudflare ), including caching layers and their impact on testing and production behavior
Be competent in DNS concepts and troubleshooting, even if DNS ownership resides elsewhere
Optimize cloud infrastructure (AWS primary; familiarity with Azure and GCP a plus) for performance, reliability, and cost
Provide architectural guidance and design recommendations for cloud assets, resource consolidation, and standardized practices
Help shape test automation strategy, recognizing AI-assisted testing and organizational QA maturity constraints
Ensure testing happens and is validated, rather than personally writing all tests
Partner with the testing team on test automation, test tracking, and incorporate into the release process
Embed quality checks as first-class controls in delivery pipelines
Serve as a technical leader who leads through influence rather than authority
Collaborate cross-functionally with application, infrastructure, and data teams
Participate in technical screening and interview panels, including short, high-signal technical screens
Coach and mentor engineers on cloud and DevOps best practices, raising overall DevOps maturity
Create and maintain durable documentation, including environment definitions, deployment processes, and runbooks