Position Summary
Nava is at the forefront of reimagining how our government serves its people, and we’re looking for experienced infrastructure engineers to help drive this mission forward. You'll be responsible for pushing the limits of these critical systems, from Billion User Load Tests to achieving and maintaining sub-millisecond transaction times. By doing this, you’ll help ensure that Nava continues delivering services that millions of Americans depend on. You care deeply about working on technology that affects people’s lives, and are passionate about building and maintaining large-scale systems that are well-designed, fast, scalable, and secure.
You will be working within the government ecosystem, which means working, sometimes closely, with other government contractors and civil servants. Working with people outside of your company means you'll likely encounter different working styles and cultural norms. At the same time, working as part of a larger team allows us to deliver on projects of larger scale and complexity. The government also imposes a level of bureaucracy that is typically not present in a company of our size in the private sector. We operate in a regulated environment, where checks and compliance is built into the process of building software. This can make the path to production slower and some decisions, such as tools and processes, lie outside of our control. However, beyond writing code, finding and recommending ways to improve the way government software is built is one of the highest-leverage ways we help fulfill our mission.
You will be working with legacy systems. While our work is to build new systems with up-to-date technology, we have to do that within an existing ecosystem. Our work is building functional, resilient software for production. We don't build flashy prototypes that don't work for real people. This usually means getting to know legacy systems, often with poor documentation and unreliable narrators, and trying to determine how to replicate the systems' behavior or how to integrate with these systems. This is a great opportunity for engineers who enjoy software archaeology. If you care deeply about how software systems work over time, and building systems for longevity and resilience, this work is for you. These responsibilities support Nava’s culture and mission: Be Active Stewards, Pursue the Root Cause, Think Long-Term, Build Together, Inclusion is Essential and Progress Takes Work.
What you'll do
- Devote approximately half time to leading agile (kanban) support team meetings and tracking ticket efficiency.
- Facilitate Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives.
- Advocate for Agile best practices and coach team members on Scrum roles and responsibilities.
- Collaborate with the Product Owner to ensure the backlog is well-defined and prioritized.
- Work on a team of infrastructure engineers building and maintaining a mature devops platform used by many teams to reliably and securely deploy applications.
- Maintain a variety of code bases (terraform, jenkins) and participate in architecture planning for improvements.
- Support project work and external requests in support tickets.
- Assist platform customers setup environments and coordinate with Delivery Lead to fill in feature gaps.
- Create, update, and archive documentation and runbooks.
- Join our on-call rotation as a first line of defense during production issues.
- Work with government partners to discuss and resolve issuesTake part in hiring activities (e.g., submitting referrals, conducting interviews, and attending interview debriefs), as needed.
Required skills
- 2+ years of experience as a Scrum Master or in a similar role within an Agile team.
- Strong understanding of the Scrum framework and Agile principles.
- Proficiency with Agile tools like Jira, Trello, or Azure DevOps.
- A curious problem solver and accomplished generalist.
- Previous experience maintaining a medium or large scale production system.
- Significant Cloud infrastructure experience in areas such as deployment automation, site reliability engineering, TCP/IP networking, platform governance, etc.
- Specific or translatable experience with AWS, terraform, jenkins, python scripting, and developer support.
- Experience working with a range of deployment patterns, from server instances to containers to lambda.
- Good written and verbal communication skills for customer and client interactions.
- Ability to pick up and learn new development and operations skills
This position is represented by Nava United
Top Skills
What We Do
Nava is a public benefit corporation working to radically improve how government serves people. Formed as a team of designers and engineers in the effort to fix HealthCare.gov in 2013, Nava now works with Medicare and the Department of Veterans Affairs. With a strong research practice and a depth of experience scaling digital services, Nava helps more than sixty million people access critical government services.
We’re thinkers and designers of civic technology. We work holistically across engineering, research, design, and operations to proactively envision the services of a better future. We build with empathy and inclusion, and as we come from many backgrounds and countries ourselves, we seek and value different perspectives. We’d love for you to come join us.