DevOps Engineer

Position Description:

Position Summary
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is an exciting and prestigious research facility that plays a vital role in the study of the universe. The Observatory operates a variety of radio telescopes that span the globe, including the famous Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. These telescopes are among the most advanced in the world, allowing astronomers to explore the universe in unprecedented detail.

The NRAO is seeking a motivated and experienced Linux Dev-Ops Engineer to join the Scientific Information Services division (SIS) and help support new Spectrum Management initiatives.

What You Will be Doing:

• Working closely with software developers, the Release Engineering team, and the SIS Operations team to ensure the successful delivery of critical applications
• Deploying applications and infrastructure in multiple on-prem datacenter environments running mixed workloads on bare-metal and hypervisors
• Assisting with the design and deployment of an evolving, modernized infrastructure stack
• Working with software teams in an Agile environment to meet the changing needs of stakeholders
• Keeping key legacy systems and processes running until they can be modernized or replaced
• Helping to make sure that both internal and stakeholder systems are fault-tolerant and meet availability goals
• Working with relational and columnar database systems (PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, etc.)
• Building dashboards and monitoring alerts to anticipate capacity and latency problems and stay ahead of outages
Work Environment
This position will be located at the NRAO Headquarters in Charlottesville, VA or the Domenici Science Operations Center (DSOC) in Socorro, NM. The successful candidate will join a team of four people tasked with core infrastructure design and implementation, and will spend the first year focused on delivering key milestones for new Spectrum Management applications.

Who You Are:

• You have a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, or combination of education and experience
• You have at least five years of systems administration or dev-ops experience with Linux-based IT systems
• You possess strong knowledge of Linux systems, deployment technologies, and general IT processes and best practices
• You are experienced with containerization and orchestration technologies like Docker, OpenShift, or Kubernetes
• You leverage "Infrastructure as Code" tools, including declarative automation such as Ansible, to work at scale
• You are comfortable with software development tools like Git, Gitlab, Jira, and Confluence
• You troubleshoot complex technical issues efficiently with an analytical mindset
• You have a holistic view of distributed systems and the skills for aligning technical solutions with stakeholder needs
• You are curious and motivated to improve processes and systems
• You are comfortable navigating ambiguity and proposing solutions independently
While not required, you may have experience:

• Deploying and scaling on-premises applications
• Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux at scale using Satellite, bootc, or other technologies
• Configuring and managing reverse proxies and load balancers like Traefik or Nginx
• Using modern observability tools like Grafana, Kibana, or Prometheus
• Utilizing relational and non-relational database systems # debugging, stabilizing, deploying
• Writing technical documents and communicating complex concepts to stakeholders
Additional Requirement
Observatory employees must be authorized to work in the United States. The Observatory presently cannot sponsor H-1B visas for this position.

Total Rewards:

Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) offers a comprehensive total rewards package for this position, subject to eligibility requirements. We are committed to serving our employees and their families with an extensive and competitive compensation and benefits package that supports our employees’ overall well-being and career growth.

Compensation
AUI strives to attract and retain dedicated, highly qualified, competent, and motivated employees by offering competitive compensation and recognition for performance.

The starting salary of this position is between $90,000-$120,000. Factors which may affect starting pay within this range may include; education, experience, skills, competencies, other qualifications of the successful candidate, as well as internal equity and labor market conditions.

Benefits:
AUI’s benefits package addresses the needs of employees and their families with most benefits beginning on the first d