DevOps Engineer

Job Title: DevOps Engineer
Clearance Required: Public Trust 
Work Location: Remote, Asheville, NC; Silver Spring, MD; Stennis, MS; Boulder, CO.  

 Alpha Omega is recruiting to staff an award for the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Data Stewardship Division (DSD), which works with NOAA and the broader community to provide and maintain the core tools, systems, services, policies, and procedures that enable long-term information preservation, dissemination, and service delivery in a cost-effective, efficient, and reliable manner. Its four branches, Data Operations, Archive, Software Engineering, and Data Access, ensure conformance with the principles, activities, and responsibilities of an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model Archive (Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, 2012; ISO 14721); follow established NOAA, Department of Commerce, and Executive Office policies; and maintain a reliable and effective infrastructure of hardware, software, processes, and procedures to ensure the long-term preservation of NOAA’s information products and services.   

 

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced DevOps Engineer to join our dynamic team at Alpha Omega. As a DevOps Engineer, you will play a crucial role in guaranteeing the availability of our country’s environmental data to a wide variety of users.  This position with NCEI’s Data Access Branch requires expertise in maintaining and updating programming code, investigating and resolving production-related errors, and engineering the automation of manual processes, where possible, through BASH and other scripting. The successful candidate will be familiar with a variety of concepts, practices, and procedures in the field, demonstrating a high degree of creativity and latitude in problem-solving. 

 

Key Responsibilities:

• 6+ years of relevant experience.
• Monitor various on-premises and cloud-based systems for proper operation through daily analysis and monitoring of diverse web applications, websites, server processes, and logs. 
• Identify and exploit opportunities for process improvement and automation. 
• Manually order and publish data that are not automated. 
• Compile and report data availability statistics for various datasets deemed of interest by NCEI leadership. 
• Manage and triage ticketing queues. 
• Troubleshoot application issues and failures. 
• Maintain and refactor programming code, primarily to remediate security concerns caused by deprecated language features, libraries, and operating systems. 
• Java (with emphasis on Spring libraries) 
• Python 
• Perl 
• Bash 

 

Required Qualifications:

Education:

• A bachelor's degree with 6+ years of relevant experience. 

Experience/Skills:

• The ability to think logically and analytically, and to approach problem solving strategically.   
• A strong understanding of using basic Unix/Linux commands to move about in a hierarchical file system, find and manipulate information, copy and move files, create or delete directories, and understand and modify file permissions.  
• An understanding of SSH, SCP, and networking, with the ability to log onto a network computer or Virtual Machine and transfer files between computer systems on a network.  
• An understanding of basic computer software application troubleshooting, including reading and analyzing log files, checking processes, etc.  
• Familiarity with electronic data download mechanisms such as FTP, SCP, HTTP(S), and cloud-based object storage (AWS S3, Ceph ) tools like the AWS S3 API and RCLONE. 
• Understanding of TCP/IP and computer addressing, including domain names, IP addresses, and port numbering. 
• Knowledge of web concepts, including HTML, CSS, URLs, static HTML, and JSP. 
• Knowledge of basic web applications and types, where code runs or is rendered in relation to A browser or web server.  
• The ability to write shell scripts to move and manipulate files by name and type. 
• Specific Basic Linux:  
• Determining what processes are running. 
• SUDO– running programs and commands using elevated security privileges. 
• Finding and monitoring - GREP, FIND, TAIL, HEAD, MORE, etc.  
• Running scripts - NOHUP, foreground/background processing. 
• Using shell editors: Vi / Emacs. 
• Checking file systems and capacities - DF, DU. 
• Understanding control files: /etc/fstab, /etc/passwd, .etm. 

 

Preferred Qualifications:

• A basic understanding of operational software application support within a customer focused environmen