DevOps Engineer

Overview

• The DevOps Engineer will play a crucial role in advancing the CDC Foundation’s mission by providing engineering and technical guidance for the design, planning, development, and delivery of critical applications in a public health organization. This role is aligned to the Workforce Acceleration Initiative (WAI). WAI is a federally funded CDC Foundation program with the goal of helping the nation’s public health agencies by providing them with the technology and data experts they need to accelerate their information system improvements. Working within the Public Health Information Systems (PHIS) division under the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LA DPH), the DevOps Engineer will drive improvements in the security, agility, responsiveness, and efficiency of software delivery processes through automation and optimization of existing deployment architectures and processes. The candidate will bridge the gap between development, product, and IT Operations teams. The DevOps Engineer will also identify opportunities for future system enhancements. Projects the DevOps Engineer will support include transitioning legacy Disease Surveillance (EDSS) and Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) into a unified platform, improving connectivity for Electronic Case Reporting (eCR) and Electronic Lab Reporting (ELR) exchanged with key interested parties using the AIMS platform, refining data ingestion from hospitals and the state department of public health, transitioning data pipelines to cloud environments (Azure), and supporting existing on-premises and hybrid-cloud systems. The DevOps Engineer will be hired by the CDC Foundation and assigned to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Public Health Information Systems (PHIS). This position is eligible for a fully remote work arrangement for U.S. based candidates.

Responsibilities

• Help build, monitor, and lead the implementation of new and ongoing DevOps and automation pipelines within the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.  
• Work across product lines and cross functional teams with focus on enhancing efficiency, reliability and security of the software, data products, deployment, and delivery processes.  
• Act as a bridge between development and IT Operations teams in automating the software deployment and configuration management processes for the identified projects.
• Develop, maintain, and oversee deployments in cloud (Azure Cloud) and hybrid-cloud environments. 
• Enhance observability practices in-use and help build tools for better monitoring, logging, and alerting to proactively collect data about applications, notify on errors, resolve issues, and improve visibility/observability into application behavior. 
• Act as DevOps Subject Matter Expert (SME) and drive adoption in the areas of containers, continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and cloud automation. 
• Facilitate training sessions for program and IT staff on using and effectively managing the pipelines. Foster DevOps adoption within the department and participate in DevOps focused guild activities.
• Perform automation and monitoring surrounding the usage of Integration Engines (Rhapsody / Mirth) for processing HL7 messages. 
• Perform deployment, administration, monitoring and support activities for deploying and operating microservices on Azure.
• Plan and develop a deployment and governance strategy for a DPH wide Application Programming Interface (API) tier.
• Plan and develop a strategy for incorporating containers and container orchestration frameworks (Docker, Kubernetes, other). 
• Prototype and provide guidance on Data Ops functions for automation surrounding analytic/scheduling frameworks (Spark, Air Flow, etc.) 
• Develop success metrics for DevOps infrastructure and drive improvement toward those measures.
• Participate in incident response activities across identified projects and mitigate issues.
• Lead postmortem discussions and drive continuous improvement to prevent similar outages.
• Work to provide developers with the best tools to ensure system uptime, performance and develop a DevOps mindset.
• Conduct technology evaluations, provide architectural guidance, and aid in incorporating industry best practices.
• Aid in load and performance testing efforts to ensure the application is ready to handle projected data volumes and traffic.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology or related field.
• Minimum of five (5) years of experience working as a DevOps Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).
• Experienced in software delivery in a production setting, with emphasis on reliability, automation, testing, measuring, and scaling infrastructure.
• In-depth knowledge of DevOps tools and system architectures including data, application, security, and network architectures.
• Experience in usage of CI/CD tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or GitLab.
• Hands on experience working in cloud-based environments (Azure, AWS, or GCP) including provisioning and managing resources using tools like Azure Bicep or CloudFormation.
• Solid understanding of ‘Infrastructure as Code’ principles and using related tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet) in a production setting.
• Proficient in scripting languages (e.g., Python, bash, PowerShell). Proficient in Linux for administration and troubleshooting tasks and experience with Windows Server environments.
• Familiarity with containerization technologies like Docker and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, or Splunk.
• Familiarity with agile development methodologies, software design patterns, and best practices.
• Outstanding interpersonal and teamwork skills; and the ability to develop productive working relationships with colleagues, stakeholders, and partners.
• Experience working in a virtual environment with remote partners and distributed teams.