Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) is searching for QA Platform Engineer (DevOps) to support our work for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), an institute of the National Institutes of Health. This opportunity is full time and onsite/remote at the NCBI in Bethesda, MD and/or remote.
NCBI is part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at National Institutes of Health (NIH). NCBI advances science and public health by providing free access to biomedical literature and genomic data over the web, making it one of the 400 top most-visited sites in the world. NCBI's diverse staff of smart, talented, and deeply technical people collaborate to build critically valuable services for researchers, physicians, educators, students, and the general public. For example, NCBI develops and delivers PubMed, an index of over 29 million biomedical research abstracts, often with links to full-text literature and supporting data.
This is a great opportunity to work on challenging problems as part of NCBI's Platforms team, in a technical, scientific, and goal-oriented environment.
The Platforms team:
- Develops and continuously improves DevSecOps, DataOps, and Observability platforms.
- Develops and maintains common tools and libraries.
- Evaluates new technologies and practices.
- Helps NCBI developers with adoption platforms, tools, architectural patterns and best practices.
- Ensures compliance with the Federal application security regulations and standards by providing automated solutions and compliance pipelines.
- Practices Agile development and continuous improvement.
The Compliance and QA team within the Platform section of NCBI focuses on:
The person filling the role of QA Test Engineer will need proven software development skills using modern computing languages such as Python, JavaScript, and Java. Other highly valued expertise includes web technologies and experience with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). In addition to automating tests (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright), a person in this role would be expected to implement frameworks and utilities to support deployment, testing, and monitoring.
- Build and maintain compliance pipelines with built-in quality gates
- Continuously automatically gather metrics for application quality for the enterprise-wide portfolio of applications
- Provide QA services on a project basis
NCBI's platforms are based on containerization, Kubernetes, GitOps and open interfaces with deployments to multiple clouds and premises.
Strong coding skills in at least one programing language is required. NCBI uses Python, Javascript/Typescript, C++, some Kotlin and Scala and a bit of Golang and Rust.
NCBI is a Linux shop, candidates need adequate level of Linux command-line skills. Sysadmin-level skills are a bonus.
Familiarity with build tools and various web, RPC and other frameworks is a bonus. Experience with design patterns in coding and architecture is a bonus.
Any knowledge of the following is helpful but not required:
- OpenShift, Anthos, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Hashicorp Nomad
- Observability tools such as Prometheus, EFK (ElasticSearch, fluentd, Kibana), TIGK (Telegraph, InfluxDB, Graphana, Kapacitor), DataDog, Sensu, Jaeger, Sentry, OpsGenie, PagerDuty.
- Service mesh technologies such as Istio, Linkerd
- Kafka, Apache Pulsar, RabbitMQ, Amazon Kinesis, Apache Flume, Apache Storm, Apache Spark Streaming, Google Cloud Pub/Sub
- GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, Teamcity, Artifactory, or equivalent products for management of Git source control, CI/CD pipelines and artifact lifecycle management.
- Secret Management tools such as Hashicorp Vault, CyberArk, Azure Key Vault, Google Cloud Secret Manager or equivalent.
Positions offered at any level. Growth mindset is encouraged and the team offers leadership opportunities at any level.
Educational Requirements
- B.S. in a STEM field (Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics) or equivalent industry experience in Systems Engineering.
We attract the best people in the business with our competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, 401k plan with employer contribution, paid holidays, vacation, and tuition reimbursement. If you enjoy being a part of a high performing, professional service and technology focused organization, please apply today!
Top Skills
What We Do
Official account of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine. NCBI serves as an international resource for the scientific research community - providing access to public databases and software tools for analyzing biological data, as well as performing research in computational biology.
The NCBI was established in 1988 by an act of the United States Congress as division of the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, with a mission to find new approaches to deal with the increasing volume and complexity of biological data in order to facilitate the understanding of genes and their role in health and disease.
The NCBI is made up of multidisciplinary research and development teams composed of molecular biologists, biochemists, structural biologists, clinicians, mathematicians, and computer scientists who:
Archive: Gather scientific and medical research data from around the globe
• Serve as the largest repository of the world’s primary biological research data
• Produce curated datasets to enhance the value and usability of the primary data
Access: Develop systems for discovering and integrating scientific and medical data
• Create search tools and data cross-referencing mechanisms
• Display and enable download of information from the world's largest collection of biological data
Advance: Promote understanding of processes that effect health and disease
• Perform cutting-edge research in computational biology
• Design and build algorithms, programs and systems for analysis of biological data
• Provide support and training through a varied and vigorous outreach program
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