DevOps Engineer

Company Description

About Element 84 

Element 84 is a woman-owned small business that works with public, private, and non-profit sector clients to develop geospatial data processing pipelines & build software that helps answer big questions about our health, our infrastructure, and our changing planet. We solve challenging problems across a wide range of industries, but our superpower is cloud-based geospatial data processing, remote sensing, and Earth science systems. Our headquarters is located in Alexandria, VA and we have a satellite office in Philadelphia, PA. Element 84 also supports a large remote workforce from a variety of other states.

A Few Other Things You Should Know

1. Element 84's values are: We Invest in Each Other, We are Reliable, and Our Work Benefits our World.

2. Element 84 works on meaningful projects that are challenging—from a technical, people, and team perspective. We make an impact on large projects through our leadership and expertise, both formal and informal.

3. Element 84 values life outside of work. We offer parental leave for everyone and support each other through family challenges like medical problems, adoptions, and new babies.

4. Element 84 has had a flexible work schedule since our founding in 2010.

5. Element 84 is committed to fostering a culture of curiosity and respect for all individuals as we constantly strive to create a work environment where everyone feels welcome and supported.

About You

You are curious about the world, are constantly learning, driven to lead (formally or informally), and have a strong work ethic. You're interested in solving impactful problems in science, medicine, and other projects that have a societal good. You can work independently or with a team, prioritize your projects, and be effective without micromanagement.

You'll care about writing. Our team is remote and written communication is essential. In addition to caring about a well-crafted email and a succinct conference abstract, you understand that good writing is good design and engineering.

Job Description

Element 84 is looking for experienced DevOps engineers with strong AWS experience to support the Technical Services Support Contract (TSSC) at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS), a NASA-funded project, located near Sioux Falls, SD.

The candidate must be a creative problem-solver who can respond to evolving development needs in an applied research setting. Applicants must be able to work within a multidisciplinary team of highly skilled Systems Engineers, Software Engineers, and Science staff, to collaborate with multiple data providers and consumers across the vast LP DAAC user community to advance the Land Change Science mission at EROS.

The candidate will work in a fast-paced Agile development environment performing operations, design, and development for the NASA Earthdata Cloud.  Earthdata Cloud is a core capability in NASA’s Earth Observing System Data Information System (EOSDIS), which provides end-to-end capabilities for managing NASA’s Earth science data from various sources – satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and other programs.  The candidate will ensure adherence to operational agreements and policies (including response times), compliance to program and NASA standards and requirements, leveraging of industry best practices for automation and scalability of assets, and implementation of issue detection and alerts.

Here are examples of things you might be working on:

• Managing automated infrastructure for handling dozens to hundreds of AWS accounts.
• Maintenance of GitHub Actions, Gitlab Pipelines, or similar and creation of new pipelines for automation.
• Writing and maintaining code for automated creation of AWS Infrastructure.
• Writing automation scripts in Python, bash/zsh, JavaScript, and other languages.
• Helping design cloud-native architectural approaches.
• Implementing systems for managing a collection of metrics and logs from potentially thousands of instances and other cloud infrastructure.
• Automating the creation of operating system images and containers.
• Working with security experts to understand organizational security requirements and create secure implementations.
• Writing and maintaining code to support Generative AI applications on domain-specific datasets.
• Plan, assist, and perform migration of on-prem systems into AWS. 
• Automating the creation of operating system images and containers.
• Defining standards for DevOps success across Element 84 and customer organizations.

Please submit your information, resume, and cover letter if you are interested in this permanent full-time position.  The position is open to candidates who are available to work onsite as needed in Sioux Falls, SD.

This position requires that applicants be legally authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship now or at any time in the future.  Candidate must have three years of continuous residency in the U.S., and be able to obtain and maintain a national agency check and background investigation after hire and to obtain a badge for US government facility access and user accounts.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 5-10 years of relevant experience
• Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering or Computer Science
• Knowledge of agile development practices using associated project management tools
• Knowledge and understanding of application hosting with an emphasis using Cloud Services in an Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) or Platform as Service (PAAS) environment
• In-depth knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS), including networking and serverless services such as Lambda and Step Functions
• Experience in supporting infrastructures and operations using DevOps automation tools such as Terraform, Puppet, Chef, or Ansible. Focus on high availability of hardware, data replication, and provide real-time recovery in failure situations
• Familiarity with the core suite of AWS services related to DevOps, with depth in those that are heavily used when providing DevOps automation solutions, including the Management and Deployment services such as Terraform and IAM
• A strong desire to automate processes, build software tools, and create infrastructure-as-code solutions in a DevOps environment
• Experience in developing data management systems
• Ability to analyze current cloud infrastructure and define, plan, communicate, and implement improvement solutions
• Well-versed in software engineering methodology and processes
• Experience with secure software development practices and concepts
• Experience with Representational State Transfer (REST) services
• Knowledge of cloud micro-service architecture including but not limited to networking, data storage, security, cloud-specific patterns, and AWS service selection.
• Working experience with deploying and managing containerized applications and platforms in Kubernetes, Helm Charts, Docker, etc.
• Willingness to support 24x7 operations (with help, of course!) as needed
• Ability to clearly document and communicate architectural concepts, cloud architecture patterns, and tradeoffs at multiple levels, including delivering presentations, creating visual designs, and writing white papers
• Experience working with an Agile Development software team
• Experience with infrastructure monitoring tools (Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch, ELK stack, New Relic, Splunk, etc.)
• Strong experience with data engineering tools and technologies (SQL, NoSQL, DynamoDB, Postgres, Redshift, Athena, Glue, etc.)
• Strong experience with Linux environments
• Working experience with cloud architecture patterns and tradeoffs (Serverless, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.)
• Working understanding of code and script (Python, Go,  Javascript, and TypeScript)
• Experience with web server technologies (Nginx, Puma, Unicorn, and/or Tomcat)

Preferred Qualifications

• Associate-level or beyond certifications, like AWS Solutions Architect, AWS DevOps, and/or Certified Kubernetes Administrator certifications
• Experience with Generative AI  technologies (e.g. AWS Bedrock, GCP Gemini, LLMs, etc.)
• Experience working in regulated contexts (e.g. NIST 800-53, PCI, HIPAA)
• Experience with authentication and authorization technologies (SAML, SSO, AWS Cognito, JWT, OAuth, etc.)
• Demonstrated ability to proactively learn new technologies while performing job duties
• Experience supporting a migration from on-prem into a cloud-based solution
• Experience administering and configuring Windows
• Experience with Google Cloud and/or Azure
• Experience with the UNIX OS.
• Experience with full life cycle Software design and development experience on large/complex n-tier client/server applications.

Additional Information

Paying attention to who we are as a company–people, family members, friends, and colleagues–is our primary focus at Element 84. There are lots of ways to run a company and for us, it's wanting to come to work, being around people we enjoy, taking on big things with people you trust, and sharing our achievements as a team.

• You’ll get credit when things go right and we’ll have your back when things go wrong.
• We only take on work that is challenging and right for us. There are projects we will turn down and the team has a say.
• We may be a small company, but we have big company benefits meant to support the idea that we're here for the long term and that happiness comes from much more than where you work. 
• We have an extraordinary retention rate because we hire extraordinary people. We hope that’s you.

The salary range for this position is $107,000-130,000.

Actual compensation offered to candidate will be finalized at offer and may be above or below the posted range due to skill level, experience, industry-specific knowledge, education/certifications, or geographic location. Base salary represents just one component of the Element 84 total compensation package. Employees will also receive a number of benefits as listed below. Other compensation for this position may include bonus eligibility (dependent on employee performance and company profits).

Benefits

• Competitive medical, dental, and vision benefits
• Life Insurance, Short & Long Term disability insurance
• Voluntary Accident, Critical Illness & Hospital Insurance
• 401(k) and Roth 401(k) retirement plans with a fixed 3% of salary employer contributions (paid regardless of employee participation)
• Health savings account with a company contribution
• Flexible spending accounts (medical, dependent care, and transportation)
• Company-paid parental leave after one year of employment
• Flexible work schedules
• Paid employee assistance program
• 9 paid holidays
• 4 weeks + 1 day Paid Time Off per calendar year (pro-rated first year)
• Cell phone stipend

Equal Opportunity Employer