Lead DevOps Engineer

Job Description:

We are looking for a highly skilled Lead DevOps Engineers with strong AWS, Terraform, Windows Server, and Containerization experience who will be part of a collaborative Kanban-driven team that supports and delivers virtual infrastructure for mission-critical health IT solutions. The ideal candidate will have deep experience with Windows environments, .NET and Node.js application deployments, AWS Lambda, ECS, and Apache NiFi data pipelines. The candidate must have a previous role as a lead or team lead with at least 2 direct reports. This is a 100% remote opportunity, however there may be instances where you would need to be onsite in Woodlawn, MD for a client meeting.

Basic Requirements:

• Ability to obtain a U.S. Federal Position of Trust clearance designation.
• Must reside in and be able to perform work in the United States.
• Must have lived in the United States for 3 of the last 5 years.
• Bachelor's degree is required.
• Lead level experience with at least 8+ years of overall experience in all the required skills.
• 6 or more years of experience working with Kanban and agile tools like Jira, Git, and Confluence. 
• 8 or more years of hands-on experience with orchestration tools such as terraform.

Required Qualifications:

Technical:

• Strong hands-on experience with Windows Server administration (2019/2022), including IIS configuration, Windows services, Active Directory integration, and Group Policy management.
• Demonstrated experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for .NET applications (ASP.NET, .NET 4.x, 8+) and Node.js applications deployed to AWS ECS and Lambda.
• Proven experience with AWS ECS (Fargate and EC2 launch types), including service definitions, task definitions, load balancer integration, auto-scaling, and blue/green deployments.
• Hands-on experience with AWS Lambda functions using Node.js and/or Go Lang, including event-driven architectures, API Gateway integration, and Step Functions orchestration.
• Experience deploying, configuring, and maintaining Apache NiFi data flow pipelines for healthcare data integration, including dataflow versioning with NiFi Registry.
• Proficiency with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code across AWS services including ECS, Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront, RDS, VPC networking, IAM, etc.
• Strong PowerShell and Bash scripting skills for automation of Windows and Linux administration tasks, deployment workflows, and operational runbooks.

Leadership:

• Demonstrated experience leading a DevOps or platform engineering team of at least 2 direct reports, with accountability for team deliverables, performance, and professional growth.
• Proven ability to manage work using Kanban methodology, including maintaining Kanban boards, enforcing WIP limits, tracking cycle time and throughput metrics, and driving continuous improvement.
• Experience mentoring and growing engineering staff, including establishing technical standards, conducting code reviews, and building a culture of accountability and continuous learning.
• Strong customer-facing communication skills with experience representing technical teams to federal program stakeholders, managing expectations, and upholding SLAs.
• Track record of balancing hands-on technical work (at least 75% of role) with people management responsibilities, including performance management and corrective action when needed.

Additional Qalifications:

• Someone with experience with tools such as Jenkins to enable CI/CD.
• Recent hands-on experience with AWS.
• Strong experience with Windows Server environments (2019/2022) and solid understanding of Linux Systems (CentOS, RedHat, Amazon Linux), hosts, networks, security, applications, and proficiency in shell scripting and PowerShell.
• Strong experience with containerization, particularly with ECS (Fargate and EC2 launch types), including deploying .NET and Node.js workloads to ECS.
• Strong understanding of Zero Trust Architecture.
• Solid understanding and proven experience with configuration management tools like Ansible, Jenkins, Terraform, Containerization, and data integration tools such as Apache NiFi.
• Believes in automation for consistent, scalable and fool-proof delivery of infrastructure and applications.
• Support production issues/high severity issues on weekends or off hours as required.
• Experience managing and mentoring staff, managing expectations and prioritization of work.
• Ability to balance many priorities and directions at once and keep the team focused and on schedule.
• Experience working day to day tasks while also innovating to make sure the team not only supports the program but actively innovates to make it better.
• Experience in working as DevOps leader focusing on CI/CD and CM tools and modern frameworks including .NET, Node.js, and serverless architectures in the ecosystem. 
• Solid hands-on experience with working on AWS.
• Strong experience with serverless resources, particularly AWS Lambda (Node.js and .NET runtimes), API Gateway, and CloudFront.
• Solid expertise troubleshooting and managing both Windows Server and Linux systems. Hands-on experience in using Ansible, PowerShell, or Python.
• Experience with Splunk is a plus
• Candidates with proven certifications and socially accessible profiles that demonstrate the body of work and participation in modern collaboration hubs. 
• A great team player and genuinely believes in solving challenges as a team.
• Willing to learn new technologies and methodologies quickly. 
• Explores alternatives and quickly prototyping to validate hypothetical architectures or solutions.
• Strong understanding of Kanban methodology and the core tenets of agile both in letter and spirit, with demonstrated experience running Kanban boards and managing WIP limits.
• Experience communicating with customers, specifically in the public sector.
• Desires to continuously learn and invest time expanding credentials relevant to role and customers.
• Demonstrated ability come up with System designs, architecture, process flows and Concept of Operations for large complex systems.
• Should have an AWS Professional certification or be ready to obtain a certification within 60 days from the date of joining.
• Knowledge of Healthcare, Medicare and Medicaid systems and data is a plus.
• Please provide any code in GitHub or such that you have worked on personally or in the open-source community.

Responsibilities:

Expectations as a People Manager:

• Use our company’s cloud-based performance management software updates function to get weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, or monthly updates from each direct report.
• Manage Team availability on your program
• Enforce the Cloud Practice SOP (standard operating procedures).
• Be the example by modeling what you want from your Staff
• Work Jira/Kanban board tickets; at least 75% of your job is to be technically hands-on.
• Help your staff grow; pick someone on the team to mentor and assign staff to mentor other staff.

· Expectations and Responsibilities to the Program/Product:

• Be available for all customer calls
• Follow up with your staff to make sure everything is going well, and tasks are getting completed in a timely manner, address injections as they arise.
• Make sure all work has a Jira ticket assigned to it
• Make sure all work you and your staff does is well documented, and PRs/Commits are attached to Jira tickets
• Uphold the Customer SLA, remember as people managers we are responsible for the work and performance of those who report to us.
• Respond to emails and slack messages quickly, if you're in a meeting, have slack represent that and check your messages as soon as it's over.
• Have a reoccurring productive and meaningful standup aligned with Kanban workflow, record it, make sure everyone attends.
• Represent your team to the customer.

· Expectations and Responsibilities to the Practice:

• Report performance issues to the practice leadership as soon as they happen
• Make sure all staff are on any all hands calls.
• Report all good news and wins back to the practice
• Report program issues, failures immediately to practice leadership
• Contribute and help other teams and encourage your staff to do the same.
• Share your work with the practice
• Help grow and mature the practice