Lead DevOps Engineer

Softrams is one of the fastest growing digital services firms in the Washington Metropolitan regions crafting human-centered solutions and empowering digital services with a focus on HX, AI, cloud, DevOps and cyber security. Our offices are located in Leesburg VA, Baltimore MD, and Plano TX, and our teams are spread across the U.S. 

Recognized as a Top Workplace USA (2024)

Recognized as one of the Top Workplaces in Technology (2023, 2021) 

INC 5000, Fastest growing companies in America (2023, 2022) 

Washington Business Journal Top 75 Fastest Growing Companies in Greater Washington area 

2020 NXT UP - Top Federal Emerging Technology and consulting firms 

2020 Inaugural DC Metro’s Most Successful Companies 

2020 Washington Technology Fast 50 

NVTC Tech 100 (2020, 2019) 

Job Description 

Softrams is looking for several Lead DevOps Engineers with strong AWS, Terraform, Linux/Windows, and Kubernetes experience who will be part of a collaborative and agile team that supports and delivers virtual infrastructure for mission-critical health IT solutions. 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. 

Federal 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.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree is required. 
• Lead level experience with at least 8+ years of overall experience in all the required skills. 
• Recent hands-on experience with AWS. 
• Solid understanding of Linux Systems (CentOS, RedHat, Amazon Linux), hosts, networks, security, applications, and proficiency in shell scripting.
• Strong experience with containerization particularly with ECS and EKS. 
• Strong understanding of Zero Trust Architecture 
• Solid understanding and proven experience with configuration management tools like Ansible and Jenkins, Terraform, Kubernetes.
• 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 in the eco-system.
• Solid hands-on experience with working on AWS
• Experience with serverless resources such as lambda, API-gateway, CloudFront 
• Solid expertise troubleshooting and managing Linux systems. Hands-on experience in using Ansible or python. 
• 8 or more years of hands-on experience with orchestration tools such as terraform. 
• Someone with experience with tools such as Jenkins to enable CI/CD.
• 6 or more years of experience working with agile tools like Jira, Git, and Confluence.
• 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
• Good understanding of the core tenets of agile both in letter and spirit

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience communicating with customers, specifically in the public sector. 
• Experience deploying to Kubernetes 
• Creating manifests and troubleshooting pods 
• Familiarity with Helm 
• Understanding of RBAC for k8s clusters 
• 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. 
• Kubernetes (Service Mesh, GitOps, securing clusters, Creating Helm Charts) 
• 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 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 throughout the day and week 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'rein a meeting, have slack represent that and check your messages as soon as it's over. 
• Have a reoccurring productive and meaningful standup, record it, make sure everyone attends. 




• 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 

Benefits and Perks:

• 65%-75% company-sponsored (including dependents) premiums towards medical, dental and vision insurance. For eligible plans and tiers, we provide 100% company-paid medical insurance. 100% employer sponsored STD, LTD and life insurance (min $100K). Voluntary life insurance option available. 
• Retirement 401(k) plan with employer matching. Immediate vesting. 
• Vacation and sick leave. 
• Maternity and parental leave.
• Discretionary bonuses, spot awards, gifts, and tenure-based rewards. 
• Company-sponsored role-based training and certifications.
• Monthly DoordashDashPass subscription. 
• Group discounts via LifeMart ADP 

Public Trust Clearance:

This role requires the hired candidate to go through public trust clearance. A minimum of 3 years of stay in the U.S. within the last 5 years is required to be eligible to qualify for public trust clearance sponsorship. 

Work Location:

We have open-collaboration offices in Leesburg VA and Baltimore MD for those who may prefer to work on-site. However, Softrams is a 100% remote-first team environment. Softrams works in the eastern time zone and standard work hours are 9am ET to 5pm ET with flexibility around start and end times based on team needs.

About Softrams:

Softrams is a Maryland and Virginia-based small business information technology, consulting, and solutions provider specializing in emerging technologies for UX/UI, mobile apps, DevOps, big data analytics, data science, and cyber security. We offer innovative technology implementations and build customer-centric services that are simple, intuitive, scalable, efficient and usable. 

EEO Statement:

Softrams, LLC. is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, or genetic information. Softrams is committed to providing access, equal opportunity, and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment, its services, programs, and activities. To request reasonable accommodation, or to participate in the job application or interview process, contact the Talent Acquisition Team at [email protected] 

Know your rights poster: https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/22-088_EEOC_KnowYourRights6.12ScreenRdr.pdf