Who we are:
The American Physical Society is a nonprofit membership organization working to advance physics by fostering a vibrant, inclusive, and global community dedicated to science and society. APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories, and industry in the United States and around the world.
Position Summary:
The DevOps Engineer plays a crucial role in enhancing developer velocity, system reliability, and security by collaborating with development, cybersecurity, and infrastructure teams. This position involves automating cloud-native technologies, deploying applications, and provisioning critical infrastructure within microservices and distributed application architectures, including containers and Kubernetes. The engineer will optimize infrastructure and utilize operational monitoring tools to ensure the health of deployed resources.
Key responsibilities include documenting deployment procedures, and implementing maintainable infrastructure-as-code solutions that adhere to industry best practices. The engineer will design automation solutions to enhance capabilities and efficiency while driving improvements in resiliency and scalability in AWS production environments.
Proactive monitoring of applications and infrastructure is essential, ensuring the availability, latency, performance, and capacity of services. The role requires managing vendor relationships, creating and maintaining technical documentation, and providing Tier 3 escalation support for security and service availability issue resolution.
The DevOps Engineer will lead cloud infrastructure architectural discussions, design Kubernetes and other AWS service deployments, and develop high-quality deployment and observability solutions. The role emphasizes delivering operational capabilities through automated testing integration and facilitating seamless delivery and deployment processes.
The APS has a “remote first” concept that promotes equal treatment and equal access, independent of physical work location, with a majority of staff working primarily from remote work locations. This position could require at times in office work, various geographic events and meeting attendance as instructed by your Supervisor. APS values diversity and welcomes candidates from a variety of backgrounds. APS offers a dynamic work environment with an outstanding total compensation package including salary, outstanding benefits, and excellent paid time off.
Responsibilities:
Developer:
- Collaborate with development teams and the Head of Digital Engineering to establish best practices for code review and change management, ensuring efficient workflows.
- Assist in bootstrapping development environments that support rapid iteration, seamless onboarding, and isolation of projects.
- Aid developers in leveraging infrastructure as code for cloud infrastructure, fostering innovation in development delivery and infrastructure architecture.
- Provide frameworks for release testing, including integration testing and blue-green deployments, to enhance deployment reliability.
Monitoring and Instrumentation:
- Design and document patterns for instrumenting applications and systems with robust monitoring and alerting capabilities and manage Kubernetes clusters for our development teams, ensuring consistent operations.
- Maintain and enhance monitoring and alerting systems for critical infrastructure and services, ensuring operational health.
- Respond promptly to infrastructure alerts and system upgrade notifications, executing necessary actions to maintain system integrity.
- Utilize infrastructure as code tooling for deploying and updating a wide array of cloud infrastructure, ensuring compliance with best practices.
- Oversee backup operations and conduct regular tests to validate restoration processes.
- Deploy and maintain systems for intrusion detection, vulnerability scanning, and alerting to safeguard organizational assets.
Automation and Scripting:
- Create automation scripts for provisioning, monitoring, backing up, patching, and deploying services, driving operational efficiency.
- Lead architectural discussions and take ownership of the design and implementation of Kubernetes service deployments.
- Develop automated integration tests to enhance software quality and reliability.
Cloud and Git Operations:
- Manage build pipelines for deploying both internally and externally developed software across multiple platforms.
- Maintain operations of Kubernetes and serverless stacks, collaborating with IS team members to establish best practices and comprehensive guidelines.
- Work closely with the software engineering teams to integrate project deliverables into customer production environments.
Performance Optimization:
- Troubleshoot complex system issues, collaborating with customers, partners, and internal teams to identify root causes and implement resolutions.
- Implement comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and logging systems to optimize performance and maintain high availability.
- Stay abreast of emerging technologies, recommending innovative solutions that enhance organizational value and operational efficiency.
- Enforce adherence to security best practices and policies across all operations, contributing to the development of the company's strategic IT roadmap.
- Other duties as assigned.
Information Systems Department:
The Information Systems departmental values complement and extend the APS Core Values. How we work and how we interact must embody these values, which encompass the areas of Customer Outcome Focus; Dedication and Responsibility; Quality and Agility; Curiosity, Open-mindedness, and Innovation; and Teamwork and Collaboration. The values are further described in a separate document, and every Information Systems employee has a responsibility for upholding them.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, related technical discipline or equivalent experience and or 5 years of experience; Experience can be considered in lieu of degree.
Certifications:
- DevOps Engineer certification
- Solutions Architect (Professional) certification
- Other AWS Certifications and equivalent experience will be considered
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:
- Minimum of 3 years’ hands-on experience working with AWS cloud services, build pipelines, infrastructure as code and DevOps Engineering (Internship experience does not apply).
- Minimum of 2 years in a technical ownership role managing technical objectives and Jira metrics reporting.
- Strong understanding of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) principles.
- Familiarity with software development, application deployment, and developer needs.
- Security fundamentals such as zero trust networking, principles of least privilege, web application security and data protection.
- Functional ability in at least one programming language.
- Proficient with Kubernetes (K8s) deployment strategies
- Experience with Kubernetes cluster lifecycle (deployment, troubleshooting, scaling).
- Experience writing Automated Tests (e.g., unit tests, acceptance tests, system/integration tests)
- Working knowledge of a wide variety of AWS services such as, Virtual Private Cloud (VPCs), Application Load Balancers, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2),Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Lambda, Amazon S3 cloud object storage, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS),Elastic Container Service(ECS).
- Proficiency in at least one Infrastructure as Code (IaC) platform such as AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) or Terraform.
- Strong skills in Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines such as Github Actions and ArgoCD.
- Proficient in containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, Podman).
- Strong organization, documentation, and prioritization skills.
- Strong ability to document and diagram infrastructure and patterns.
- Excellent attention to detail.
- Ability to adapt to quickly changing schedules.
- Ability to work well independently.
Travel: The position requires up to 5% of travel for in-person meetings with staff as well as periodic, as well as additional travel as assigned.
Salary:
The salary range for this position takes into account various factors influencing compensation decisions, such as skill sets, experience, training, and other business and organizational requirements. The salary listed within the specified ranges considers relevant experience. Our compensation philosophy at APS aims to maintain salaries at the midpoint of the market. As a result, we typically hire within the target starting range. Exceptional, rare cases may merit reviews above target starting range for specialized or niche skills aligned with strategic operational goals.
Hiring Range: $130,240/year - $177,452/year (USD)
Target Starting Range: $130,240/year - $144,892/year (USD)
