Staff DevOps Engineer

Title: Staff DevOps Engineer

Location: Remote (U.S.) or Chandler, AZ
Reports to: VP of Engineering
Employment Type: Exempt / Full-Time

About StrongMind

StrongMind is a remote-first education and technology company on a mission to transform learning for students, families, and educators across the country. For more than 25 years, we’ve partnered with schools and districts to deliver innovative, student-centered learning experiences powered by technology, compassion, and bold thinking.

We believe education should be flexible, human, and built for real life. That belief shapes how we design our products, support our partners, and work together as a team. At StrongMind, you’ll find smart people doing meaningful work, a culture rooted in trust and accountability, and leaders who genuinely care about both outcomes and people.

The Team You Will Join

You’ll be part of the Engineering team, working closely with product engineering teams, Release, Security, and engineering leadership to build and maintain a reliable, secure, and increasingly self-service technology platform.

StrongMind runs most of its production workloads on AWS, and this team is focused on strengthening our cloud infrastructure, improving observability and reliability, modernizing CI/CD, and embedding security throughout how we build, deploy, and operate our systems.

The team culture is collaborative, innovative, and highly autonomous. This role is designed for someone who enjoys owning complex technical environments, building systems and standards from the ground up, and helping establish the foundation for a future DevOps / Platform Engineering team.

The Difference You Will Make

As a Staff DevOps Engineer, you’ll own and evolve StrongMind’s AWS environment while helping raise the overall bar for reliability, security, observability, and developer experience.

Your work will directly impact our ability to build and deliver dependable learning technology by strengthening production infrastructure, improving deployment processes, reducing operational risk, and creating tools that help engineering teams move faster and more safely.

You’ll also play a key role in migrating remaining Azure services to AWS and establishing the standards, automation, documentation, and operational practices needed to scale our platform over time.

A Typical Day Looks Like

While no two days are exactly the same, you can expect to:

• Own and evolve AWS infrastructure, including ECS, VPC networking, Route 53, secrets management, and overall cloud security posture.
• Harden production environments by improving cluster reliability, load balancing, auto-scaling, health checks, and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Maintain and expand Infrastructure-as-Code using Pulumi or similar technologies, keeping infrastructure versioned, reusable, policy-checked, and increasingly self-service.
• Build and standardize CI/CD pipelines through GitHub Actions across Ruby, C#, Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript codebases.
• Establish deployment patterns such as blue/green and canary deployments, automated rollback, and secure pipeline gates.
• Build observability through centralized logging, distributed tracing, metrics, dashboards, alerting, and SLOs/SLIs using tools such as CloudWatch, X-Ray, and OpenSearch.
• Strengthen cloud security through least-privilege IAM, encryption, network security, secrets management, vulnerability scanning, and continuous cloud security posture management.
• Partner with Security and Compliance on SOC 2 evidence, audit trails, security controls, and remediation efforts.
• Support the migration of remaining Azure workloads to AWS, including containerization, traffic cutovers, and database migrations.
• Create architecture decision records, runbooks, technical documentation, and operational standards that serve as the source of truth for the platform.
• Mentor engineers on cloud-native architecture, Infrastructure-as-Code, secure-by-default design, and operational excellence.
• Collaborate with Release and engineering teams on deployment quality gates, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• This position requires availability to work core business hours of 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM Arizona time, Monday through Friday.

This role balances independent ownership, technical strategy, collaboration, and hands-on execution and is well-suited for someone who enjoys building, solving complex problems, improving systems, and creating scalable technical foundations.

Your Expertise Includes

We’re looking for someone who brings:

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Deep, hands-on AWS experience, including ECS Fargate, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, CloudWatch, IAM, VPC networking, and S3.
• Proven experience improving observability, uptime, reliability, and operational maturity in production cloud environments.
• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience for managing multi-environment infrastructure, including Pulumi or similar tools and policy-as-code/IaC scanning.
• Experience securing production cloud environments through least-privilege IAM, encryption, network security, secrets management, and remediation of security findings.
• Strong CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions across multiple programming languages and repositories, including automated security scanning.
• Hands-on Docker experience, including multi-stage builds, base image management, runtime configuration, health checks, and image lifecycle management.
• Solid networking fundamentals, including VPC design, security groups, DNS, load balancing, and CDN configuration.
• Experience managing relational databases through RDS/Aurora, including performance tuning and backup strategies.
• Comfort working independently as a primary infrastructure owner while creating the standards and automation needed to support future team growth.

Bonus points if you also have:

• 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 such as EventBridge, SQS/SNS, or Kinesis.
• Experience with data pipeline technologies such as Dagster, AWS Glue, or Step Functions.
• FinOps experience, including cloud cost optimization, reserved capacity, and right-sizing.
• DevSecOps tooling experience, including Trivy, Dependabot, Snyk, Checkov, Prowler, Security Hub, or GuardDuty.
• Experience supporting SOC 2 or other compliance programs.
• AWS Security Specialty, CISSP, or another relevant security certification.
• Experience with EdTech platforms or integration standards such as Canvas LMS, PowerSchool, Clever, LTI, or OneRoster.
• Experience building and leading a DevOps or Platform Engineering team.

Our Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging

At StrongMind, we believe the best ideas come from bringing together people with different perspectives, experiences, and ways of thinking. A diverse and inclusive workplace fuels creativity, strengthens collaboration, and helps us build better solutions for the students, families, and communities we serve.

We are committed to welcoming a broad range of talent and encouraging all qualified individuals to apply. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and is empowered to contribute, grow, and do meaningful work.

How We’ll Take Care of You

We believe that when people feel supported, they do their best work. At StrongMind, your well-being isn’t a perk—it’s part of our culture.

Our commitment to you includes:

• A competitive total compensation package, including medical, dental, vision, and voluntary benefits
• Well-being that works for real life—from an on-site gym, virtual wellness programs, and wellness coaching to flexible work options for select roles, because your well-being fuels your brilliance
• Unlimited PTO for exempt roles, plus additional “life happens” days when you need flexibility
• A fully paid holiday week off at Christmas, so you can truly rest, reset, and reconnect
• Recognition and rewards that celebrate birthdays, meaningful milestones, legendary work, and community service hours that let you give back
• Quarterly Town Halls that keep communication transparent, honest, and human
• Annual social events and traditions we genuinely look forward to—like Halloween celebrations, Wellness Fairs, and other moments that bring our community together

We’re intentional about building a workplace where people feel valued, connected, and empowered to thrive—at work and beyond.

Additional Info:

We welcome all qualified candidates eligible to work in the United States. At this time, we are unable to sponsor visas.

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and provide consideration to all applicants regardless of race, religion, color, sex, gender, national origin, age, veteran status, marital status, or disability protected by law.