Senior/Staff DevOps Engineer, AWS (HHS)

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services. We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists. The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, DevOps engineers work with developers throughout the software development life cycle to ensure code can be reliably and repeatedly released on demand with a high degree of quality. They understand both software development and operations, with expertise in areas such as networking, security, test automation, and continuous integration/deployment.

What you’ll do

• Develop infrastructure to support critical public health tooling for state, local, territorial, and tribal partners
• Engineer a great experience for developers who are working in web-based environments such as Ruby, Python, Java, and Node.js through automation, virtualization, and process improvement
• Achieve technical excellence by advocating for and adhering to lean-agile engineering principles and practices such as simple design and automated testing
• Protect sensitive data by applying security and privacy best practices
• Conduct security audits and risk analyses
• Plan and implement remediations
• Select and use the right tools, frameworks, languages, and technologies for the job, with a preference for open-source solutions

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Experience working with AWS cloud infrastructure, including deploying and managing services in enterprise or government environments
• Proficiency in Terraform for managing infrastructure as code in AWS-based environments
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate across technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfort engaging directly with end users and client stakeholders to understand needs and communicate solutions
• Ability to clearly articulate technical, design, and business tradeoffs when making decisions
• Demonstrated ability to learn, understand, and modernize legacy systems
• Understanding of the general concepts of modern software development and ability to work closely with software engineers
• Comfort with developing infrastructure intended for handoff to customers or other partners
• Ability to work in a cloud-centric world, which includes managing disparate, interconnected systems and ensuring the availability, reliability, and resiliency of these systems
• Ability to enable teams to deliver value to users and the business continuously (e.g., CI/CD pipelines)
• Knowledge of how to build secure, compliant applications and defend against common vulnerabilities
• Ability to work with software engineers to instrument applications and configure infrastructure for monitoring, metrics, alerting, logging, auditability, and compliance
• Knowledge of creating and maintaining your infrastructure as code and standardize deployment processes
• Ability to work successfully within a professional services environment (e.g., can communicate effectively with clients)
• Passion for creating better public outcomes through great government services
• A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values
• Ability to travel for work from time to time

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience flexing into software development tasks as part of a delivery team
• Experience with legacy system modernization efforts
• Experience with Docker and containerized services, including Kubernetes
• Comfort working in a variety of cloud platforms
• Prior experience working in a hybrid cloud or on-prem environment
• Knowledge of how to operate in highly regulated government environments (FedRAMP, FISMA, etc)
• Familiarity with healthcare technology and standards (HL7, FHIR, etc)
• Prior experience working in the civic tech space
• Experience working in a remote team environment

Don’t meet 100% of the criteria but think you can do the job? We’d love to chat anyway! We’re on a mission to build diverse teams, and studies have shown that women and marginalized folks are less likely to apply to jobs if they don’t check every box.

Other requirements

• All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories. Some federal contracts require U.S. citizens