Principal DevOps Engineer, IT - DevOps Engineers

Ascensus is the leading independent technology and service platform powering savings plans across America, providing products and expertise that help nearly 16 million people save for a better today and tomorrow.

Section 1: Position Summary

The Principal DevOps Engineer is a technical leadership role, responsible for day-to-day oversight of the application engineering/DevOps practices, maintaining a disciplined and stable application environment for development, testing and production. This position provides technical leadership to the DevOps Engineers and provides the highest level of support for application issues in the production and development environments. This position also evaluates innovative and alternative solutions, provides recommendations, and identifies risk and cost. The Principal DevOps Engineer is responsible for

the strategic design, scalability, and performance of the application systems infrastructure, including automation practices and tools leveraged. This position provides consultative services to the business units and IT management on all phases of projects.

Section 2: Job Functions, Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Oversee server builds, deployments, packaging, integration, automation and releases of our Software.
• Continuously collaborating with team(s) to evaluate Monitoring and Performance of the environment & build Standards and consistent practices around Infrastructure as Code.
• Responsible for process development, ensuring opportunity to automate scripts for software builds and deployments and lead in helping streamline the pipeline
• Participate in Technology/Architecture and design discussions and required to contribute to developing the solutions architecture, designing automation templates for infrastructure provisioning, configuration & change management, and developing the detailed technical design.
• Lead researching on new tools/ technology solutions/processes, build consensus and plan to introduce cost justifiable technology to improve SDLC pipeline
• Provide day to day technical leadership to the application engineers and be an evangelist of Devops principles to the team(s)
• Continually finding ways to optimize and building out a comprehensive architecture/strategy for supporting applications in production
• The scope of work includes build, machine configuration, test infrastructure and virtual machine deployment.
• Responsible for protecting and securing all client data held by Ascensus to ensure against unauthorized access to and/or improper transmission of information that could result in harm to a client.
• The I-Client philosophy and the Core Values of People Matter, Quality First and Integrity Always® should be visible in your actions on a day to day basis showing your support of our organizational culture.

Supervision  

• Lead the teams across projects, supporting by problem-solving / trouble shooting and innovating/ building solutions for infrastructure needs
• Collaborate with other technology leaders across the organization (Engineering/DBA/Operations) to optimize our environments.
• Yes-Mentoring & Coaching, No - People management

Section 3:  Experience, Skills, Knowledge Requirements

• Minimum of 10+ years of Hands-on experience working as a DevOps/Build/Deployment and Engineering & Operations skills
• Experience with Agile/Scrum, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and related tools
• Hands-on experience in production environments, both deploying and troubleshooting applications in Linux environment.
• Strong experience automating with scripting languages such as Bash, Python, Groovy and any deployment scripting languages
• Strong experience with CI/CD deployment supporting Java technologies (Jenkins, Nexus, Apache, JBoss, Tomcat, Perforce/Git )
• Highly Proficient in Configuration Management (Ansible, Chef or Similar)
• Hands-on experience with Containerization, Docker & Kubernetes is required.
• Excellent understanding of Micro-services architecture, design patterns, and standard methodologies with an eye towards scale, automation, resiliency, high availability and disaster recovery.
• Excellent understanding of networking, load balancing, caching, security, config and certificate management.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related discipline or equivalent work experience.
• Nice to Have Skills
• Experience with some of key AWS services (IAM, VPC, Lambda, EKS, MSK, Keyspace, Codepipeline)
• Experience with Java ecosystem (Maven, Ant, Tomcat, JBoss)
• Experience with Node ecosystem (JavaScript, Angular, Npm, JQuery.)
• Experience with infrastructure as code software like Terraform
• Understanding of SOA and distributed computing
• Experience with Test Driven Development (TDD) practices with an automated testing framework
• Additional Skills
• Must possess ability to work independently in a fast-paced, dynamic environment
• Must be a team player and a leader who understands the importance of teamwork, collaboration, and open communication, including a willingness to occasionally work in a pair-programming environment
• Must possess strong analytical and technical documentation skills
• Must possess ability to effectively present information and respond to questions
• Experience with distributed systems or a large enterprise background is preferred
• Must have an excellent understanding and hands-on experience with design and development best practices
• Detail orientation and strong attention to detail
• Understanding of SDLC automation concepts such as continuous integration
• As a leader, you should be passionate about mentoring and coaching your team. We believe in transparency,processes, data sharing, collaboration, and communication that foster a DevOps culture. When you join our team, you get to go to work every day knowing that you help over 10 million Americans save for retirement and college.

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer

Be aware of employment fraud. All email communications from Ascensus or its hiring managers originate from @ascensus.com or @futureplan.com email addresses. We will never ask you for payment or require you to purchase any equipment. If you are suspicious or unsure about validity of a job posting, we strongly encourage you to apply directly through our website.