Senior DevSecOps Engineer - Velocity Platform

Nelnet Servicing•Lincoln, NE

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Nelnet is seeking a Senior DevSecOps Engineer to take ownership of the infrastructure, deployment automation, and security posture for Velocity, Nelnet's cloud-native loan servicing platform. Velocity is the company's first major enterprise system to run entirely in AWS and is a fully serverless platform. It comprises approximately 50-60 Node.js/TypeScript microservices running on AWS Lambda behind API Gateway, an event-driven backbone using SNS/SQS with namespace-based filtering, Aurora PostgreSQL for data storage with read-replica clusters, and infrastructure provisioned via CloudFormation. The team utilizes GitHub and GitHub Actions for delivery across four environments (Dev, QA, Train, Production) and monitors using CloudWatch and Datadog. The role emphasizes a "code-first" approach to the entire cloud system lifecycle, including provisioning, deployment, maintenance, and retirement, with security controls integrated into the pipeline. Given Velocity's operation in the financial services sector, adherence to client-defined vulnerability remediation commitments and compliance obligations, including SOC 2, is critical. This is a senior, high-autonomy position where the engineer will be expected to define problems, propose solutions, socialize them with relevant teams, and then implement them. The role also involves being a senior technical voice, setting standards, and elevating the technical capabilities of the team.

Requirements

1-3+ years of experience with AWS DevOps, cloud architecture, networking, deployment processes, and infrastructure as code tools.
Experience solving complex problems, creating algorithms, and working through challenging requirements.
Experience creating software in an agile, iterative environment.
Experience with source control (Git, branching, merging, etc.).
Ability to obtain a security clearance.
Candidates must already be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future sponsorship.

Nice To Haves

Knowledge in the area of Federal Government NIST compliance preferred.

Responsibilities

Monitor and support all installed systems and infrastructure.
Evaluate system performance, identify potential bottlenecks, develop solutions, and implement change via the change management process.
Design, implement and monitor enterprise-grade secure fault-tolerant infrastructure.
Define and evolve Build & Release best practices by working within teams and educating other stakeholder teams, ensuring traceability & auditability of change.
Ensure continuous availability of various DevOps tools supporting SCM & Release Management including Source Control, Continuous Integration, & Change Management.
Work with cross-functional teams in design, development and implementation of enterprise scalable features related to enabling higher developer productivity, environment monitoring and self-healing, and facilitate autonomous delivery teams.
Build infrastructure automation tools and frameworks.
Integrate newly developed and existing applications into cloud environments.
Automate deployment pipelines in a scalable, secure and reliable manner.
Leverage application monitoring tools to troubleshoot and diagnose environment issues.
Automate any repetitive work.
Work closely with Cloud Infrastructure and Security teams to ensure organizational best practices, policies, and procedures are followed.
Automate security controls.