Senior DevOps Engineer

AAA Life Insurance Company•Livonia, MI

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a seasoned Senior DevOps Engineer to help lead our transition from legacy infrastructure to a modern, cloud-native environment. This role is critical in shaping the future of our technology stack as we modernize core systems to support agility, scalability, and innovation. The ideal candidate will bring deep expertise in cloud platforms, automation, and infrastructure as code, with a strong understanding of DevOps best practices. You will work closely with cross-functional teams to design and implement secure, dependable, and efficient CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure. A key part of your role will be mentoring junior engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence. You will also play a strategic role in evaluating legacy systems and recommending modernization paths aligned with business goals. Effective communication skills and a collaborative mindset are essential, as you will be working across teams to drive change. This is a unique opportunity to make a lasting impact on a growing insurance company’s digital transformation journey.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or related field—or equivalent experience.
5+ years of DevOps engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a senior or lead role.
Proven experience with CI/CD tooling (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, etc.) and release automation.
Strong IaC skills (Terraform, AWS CDK, CloudFormation) and experience with multi-account cloud patterns.
Demonstrated observability experience (Open Telemetry, tracing, metrics, logging — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch).
Hands-on experience with application servers and middleware technologies (IBM WebSphere, Apache Tomcat, Glassfish, Payara, WebLogic).
Experience with application performance monitoring, disaster recovery planning, and high availability solutions.
Solid understanding of SSL, load balancers, DNS, and networking fundamentals.
Experience with testing and debugging tools (LoadRunner, RFHUTIL, JUnit).
Familiarity with Agile methodologies and SDLC processes.
Strong documentation, architectural diagramming, and technical leadership skills.
Security-first mindset: integrating SAST/DAST, secrets scanning, OIDC/OAuth and RBAC into pipelines and runtime.

Nice To Haves

Background in insurance, financial services, or other regulated industries.
Experience with IBM MQ, Message Broker, DataPower, WSRR, and middleware security.
Familiarity with SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g., SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle).
Experience with application delivery controllers (e.g., Citrix NetScaler, F5).
Exposure to configuration management tools (Chef, Puppet, Ansible).
Familiarity with developer portals (Backstage) and platform-as-product practices.

Responsibilities

Integrate simple to complex Java applications in multiple environments, the applications can be a combination of in-house developed or vendor-delivered applications.
Formulate and enforce application deployment and integration standards.
Design, develop, implement, and support the runtime architecture for of complex system landscapes.
Develop, implement, and maintain the environment by automating deployment and various configurations.
Actively participates in project meetings and provides input to design and implementation of middleware solutions.
Actively participates in leadership meetings to provide architectural designs, diagrams and recommendations that impact technology decisions made throughout the company.
Facilitating the product teams in planning, estimating and non-functional requirements on projects.
Proactively analyze the entire environment and recommend, develop, and implement improvements. Be a champion for process improvements, fostering innovative thinking.
Performs periodic reviews of the technical operating environment and ensures adherence to corporate standards. Where standards are unclear, or undefined, they assist in the creation or updating of policies and procedures.
Takes personal ownership for problems and independently performs complex troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, solution development and implementation.
Research modern technologies to see where they could fit within our SDLC to help with smooth deployments while increasing uptime and reducing customer impact.
Maintains clear and concise documentation representative of the operating environment including Architectural diagrams, policies, procedures, and standards. Is extraordinarily strong at documentation.
Acts as the technical lead to the rest of the Middleware team.
Develops, maintains, and evaluates Disaster Recovery plans.
Willingness to work overtime, weekends, and irregular hours.