DevOps Lead

At Elsevier, in Washington, DC and around the world, we are building something special. As we try to do things right, we are working to build a culture that values the rightness of good DevOps and SRE – the speed, agility, cost savings, higher quality, etc. If you are a talented and self-motivated DevOps Systems Engineering Lead with proven experience managing engineers and want to work us as we learn and grow, and if you want a leadership team who gets DevOps and why it's important, click on the "Apply Now" button and share your wins and contact details with us.

DevOps is a key position within the Engineering division of the Elsevier product, Interfolio. The incumbent in this role will play a critical part in developing a Centre of Excellence responsible for delivering shared solutions for infrastructure operations across our suite of products. To fill this role successfully, the candidate will need a strong background in cloud technologies, DevOps, and infrastructure automation, as well as a deep understanding of a broad set of modern scripting and OO programming languages. AWS skills are a plus.

In addition to the technical skills required in this position, a well-developed sense for working with people is important. As a member of the DevOps team, you'll be working with a broad swathe of contributors across Elsevier's Technology organization, as well as a number of key folks in our vendors' services and technologies teams. Importantly, we're looking for an evangelist, a leader, a partner, and a teammate. A person that can talk the talk and walk the walk. The formal part of the description is below.

The position of DevOps Lead is open to remote employees as well as locals in commuting distance to our Washington, D.C. office. Candidates applying for this position must currently reside within the continental United States.

Responsibilities (fancy words describing SRE/DevOps things you'll need to be good at):

Lead and manage a team. You have demonstrated strong leadership qualities in your craft, in your collaboration with colleagues across a broad spectrum of roles, and in the development, care, coaching and mentorship of your team.
Collaborate effectively within an agile team, and in close collaboration with Quality, Delivery and Product teams delivering continuous improvements in customer outcomes.
Participating in the configuring, deploying, monitoring, and supporting the hosting of applications in AWS and ensuring the use of IaC best practices on our software infrastructure assets.
Ensure effective monitoring and automation supporting the effective management and consumption of cloud resources.
Operate and maintain software systems across the full breadth of the SDLC and ensure optimal construction and implementation of CI/CD pipelines.
Work with the Support and Development teams to ensure troubleshooting, diagnosis and rectification of hosting issues, and provide effective solutions through the applied integration of infrastructure, software, and software delivery best practices.

Must Haves (things we'll ask you to tell us about when we talk):

Experience leading and managing an engineering team, with a proven track record in leading seasoned and developing junior engineers.
DevOps experience in large, multi-product environments, with large scale production cloud hosting, including budgeting.
Experience authoring CI/CD pipelines, automation elements related to infrastructure composition, deployment orchestration, and monitoring.
A good understanding of working in an Agile environment and its working practices.
A positive and constructive attitude and approach to cross-functional collaboration across the stack (frontend/backend and DevOps) and good execution.
Awareness of longer-term impacts of architectural/deployment/automation choices.
Comfortable presenting and communicating ideas to key stakeholders and engineers alike.
Ability to convince people to follow your lead.

Nice to Haves (even more things it'd be great if you knew about):

Experience in AWS Architecture, ideally with an accreditation.
Experience using Terraform and/or CloudFormation as an automation technology.
Experience deploying configuration management via Ansible, Salt, Puppet or Chef.
Experience with source code version control systems like GitHub or GitLab.
Experience managing and running production workloads on Docker, Fargate and ECS.
Experience using modern scripting and OO programming languages as a contributing member within an agile squad.
Experience of implementing infrastructure, service-based monitoring solutions and supporting Linux systems.
Experience using some of the following tools & technologies: Nginx, Passenger, Elasticsearch, DataDog, Sentry, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Bash, PHP, Ruby, Elixir, Golang, JavaScript, Bazel, Python, Docker, CodeDeploy.
A good understanding of the security controls required to host applications and services in the cloud.
A good understanding of release management techniques within a cloud hosted environment.

Working at Elsevier

You will be part of the Interfolio development hub – a growing key technology hub, which is part of the Elsevier development organization. Around 70 technology colleagues are located around the world, split into several engineering teams building different parts of our eco-system targeting universities around the world. We work in closely aligned, focused teams consisting of product management, UX, software, system and quality engineers.

Travel

This can be an office-based or a home-based remote role; however, occasionally you get to travel and visit either our office in Washington, DC or meet at other locations for offsite planning sessions.