Senior DevOps Engineer

University of Chicago•Chicago, IL

1d•$150,000 - $170,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Globus Operations team is a 4–5 person group that designs, builds, and operates the cloud infrastructure behind a research-computing platform used by hundreds of institutions worldwide. Globus combines AWS-hosted orchestration services with installable applications, providing identity and access management, data transfer and sharing, and task automation as SaaS and PaaS. As a senior member of this small, high-autonomy team, you will integrate software development and operational best practices across Globus services and AWS infrastructure. The team manages an AWS Organization of roughly thirty production accounts, a golden-image pipeline, a self-hosted monitoring platform, centralized security logging, and in-house compliance and security automation. Infrastructure and tools 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 is suited to a senior engineer comfortable both improving build pipelines and debugging production incidents, and who can lead and educate colleagues across teams. The role participates in an on-call rotation and involves occasional evening or weekend hours. Remote work is available, with occasional required attendance at in-person meetings.

Requirements

College or university degree in a related field.
5–7 years of work experience in a related job discipline.
Occasional evening or weekend hours and participation in an on-call support rotation.
Ability to provide operational and infrastructure guidance and work on complex issues, including independently with minimal guidance.

Nice To Haves

Strong experience operating AWS at scale, including IAM, VPC, EC2 and Auto Scaling Groups, ECS (EC2 and Fargate), S3, RDS, Route 53, Lambda, Systems Manager, and CloudWatch, including cross-account work in a multi-account AWS Organization.
Strong experience building infrastructure as code with Terraform, including modules, remote state, provider upgrades, and reconciling drift against live environments; maintaining and incrementally retiring legacy CloudFormation is a plus.
Experience automating infrastructure in Python using maintainable, reusable libraries and boto3, as well as Bash.
Experience building Amazon machine images and their instances, Docker containers, and CI/CD tooling such as AWS CodeBuild and GitHub Actions.
Linux administration and troubleshooting across Ubuntu and RPM-based distributions, including systemd, syslog/rsyslog, storage, and SSH/sudo configuration.
Knowledge of 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 practices 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 project milestones and deadlines.
Ability to work independently and as a team member, take end-to-end ownership of services with minimal supervision, and switch between long-horizon engineering projects and time-sensitive operational work.
Receptiveness to feedback and willingness to learn and embrace continuous improvement.
Experience with software development fundamentals such as code review, automated testing, and static analysis, and integrating development and deployment frameworks with monitoring, operations, and orchestration to run applications securely and at scale on public cloud platforms.

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 via SSM Parameter Store, KMS-encrypted and shared across accounts.
Maintain monitoring and alerting systems, including self-hosted Nagios/NRPE, CloudWatch alarms, and PagerDuty routing, and help migrate to Prometheus.
Contribute to Globus's security plan, 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 better defaults.
Provide technical consultation and support to engineering and user-support teams for operational issues and troubleshooting.
Design new systems, features, and tools; solve complex problems; identify opportunities for technical improvement and performance optimization; and review and test code against appropriate standards.
Apply technical knowledge of existing and emerging technologies, including public cloud offerings from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
Perform other related work as needed.