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[Remote] Staff DevOps Engineer
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. StrongMind is a remote-first education and technology company focused on transforming learning through technology and student-centered experiences. The Staff DevOps Engineer will build and operate reliable, secure, and scalable AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure, improve observability and CI/CD delivery, strengthen DevSecOps practices, and support the migration of remaining Azure services to AWS.
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve AWS infrastructure, including EKS clusters, networking, DNS, secrets management, and related cloud services
- Harden production environments by improving cluster reliability, autoscaling, ingress, load balancing, health checks, and security controls
- Maintain and expand Infrastructure-as-Code using Pulumi, ensuring infrastructure is versioned, repeatable, policy-checked, and increasingly self-service
- Build and standardize CI/CD and GitOps workflows using GitHub Actions, Argo CD, and Kargo
- Improve deployment strategies, including progressive promotion, blue/green deployments, canary releases, and automated rollback
- Build and maintain Docker images and deployment workflows across Go, Ruby, Python, TypeScript, and C#/.NET applications
- Develop observability using OpenTelemetry and Datadog, including centralized logging, distributed tracing, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and SLOs/SLIs
- Strengthen DevSecOps practices through automated dependency, container, secrets, static analysis, and Infrastructure-as-Code scanning
- Monitor and remediate cloud security findings while maintaining strong identity, encryption, network, and secrets-management practices
- Support incident response, post-incident learning, and improvements that increase uptime and reduce time to resolution
- Partner with engineering teams to improve service testability, deployment patterns, observability, and self-service infrastructure
- Support the migration of remaining Azure services to AWS, including containerization, routing, and database migration
- Write architecture decision records, runbooks, and documentation that establish clear standards for operating the platform
- Use automation and AI-enabled tools to improve workflows, solve problems, and increase efficiency while applying sound technical judgment
Skills
- 5+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, or a closely related field
- Strong hands-on AWS experience, including EKS, RDS/Aurora, SQS/SNS, Lambda, EventBridge, IAM, VPC networking, S3, and ECR
- Production Kubernetes experience, including workload scheduling, resource management, and GitOps-based delivery
- Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience for managing multi-environment infrastructure; experience with Pulumi is preferred
- Experience with Kubernetes and GitOps tools such as Helm, Kustomize, Argo CD, and similar deployment platforms
- Strong CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions across multiple programming languages and application stacks
- Experience building and managing Docker images, including multi-stage builds, base image management, and runtime configuration
- Solid networking fundamentals, including VPC design, security groups, DNS, load balancing, Kubernetes ingress, and CDN configuration
- Working knowledge of cloud security, including IAM, SCPs, KMS, ACM, secrets management, and cloud security posture management
- Proven experience improving observability, reliability, uptime, and operational maturity in production environments
- Experience managing relational databases, particularly RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL, including performance tuning and backup strategies
- Comfort owning infrastructure work with autonomy and minimal hand-holding
- Strong problem-solving, communication, documentation, and collaboration skills
- We welcome all qualified candidates eligible to work in the United States. At this time, we are unable to sponsor visas
- Experience migrating workloads from Azure or another cloud platform to AWS
- Familiarity with Azure services such as App Service, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Service Bus, Event Grid, Key Vault, or Application Insights
- Experience with event-driven architectures using EventBridge, SQS/SNS, or Kinesis
- Experience operating an API gateway such as Kong and managing WAF/CDN protections
- Experience with FinOps, including cloud cost optimization, right-sizing, and reserved capacity
- Experience with DevSecOps tools such as Trivy, Dependabot, Snyk, or Checkov
- Experience with commercial security platforms such as Wiz, CrowdStrike, or Palo Alto Networks
- SOC 2 or other compliance program experience, or a security certification such as AWS Security Specialty or CISSP
- Experience with EdTech platforms or integration standards such as Canvas LMS, PowerSchool, Clever, LTI, or OneRoster
- Experience with data pipeline tooling such as Dagster or AWS Glue
- Experience mentoring or onboarding engineers onto a DevOps or Platform Engineering team
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, and voluntary benefits
- An on-site gym
- Virtual wellness programs
- Wellness coaching
- Flexible work options for select roles
- Unlimited PTO for exempt roles
- Additional “life happens” days when you need flexibility
- A fully paid holiday week off at Christmas
- Recognition and rewards for birthdays, meaningful milestones, legendary work, and community service hours
- Quarterly Town Halls
- Annual social events and traditions, including Halloween celebrations and Wellness Fairs
- Remote work option for U.S. employees
Company Overview