Senior DevOps Engineer at Blue Sky eLearn

Are you ready to join an established (but also growing and innovating!) tech company that’s making waves in the eLearning space?

What We Need (the must-have requirements):

• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, specifically for web-based SaaS products
• 3+ years of experience with AWS
• 1+ year of experience with a modern Cloud Infrastructure Platform (Qovery, Porter, etc.)
• Proficiency with Kubernetes
• 3+ years of experience with Docker
• 3+ years of experience with CircleCI or other industry leading CI/CD
• Experience working with and scaling PostgreSQL, Redis, memcache, and MongoDB
• Strong understanding of Information Technology operations, infrastructure, and application architecture principals
• Strong experience with observability tools, APM tools and cloud monitoring tools
• Experience migrating between cloud providers and/or building multi-cloud environments
• Experience developing and executing disaster recovery plans and various methods to thwart or minimize the impact of outages and potential incidents.
• Concrete understanding of DevSecOps principles

What We’re Looking For (the intangibles that often don’t get mentioned):

• Comfortable being the first member of a team of 1; can work independently with minimal oversight
• Desire and ability to be a team lead, mentor, and advocate for additional DevOps Engineers that we may bring on in 2023
• Have a strong sense of ownership over our infrastructure
• Bring new ideas and a fresh perspective to the table; provide guidance and leadership in regards to security and best practices
• Be able to absorb feedback, take direction, and operate within boundaries without ego
• Think critically and find repeatable solutions for issues and challenges
• Have excellent time management skills and meet deadlines, all while delivering exceptional work
• Keep the focus on learners, clients, and internal stakeholders
• Demonstrate vision, courage, respect, and accountability
• Be a respectful, flexible team member, and overall good human
• Be authentic, engaged, and endlessly collaborative

The Nice-To-Haves (but not required):

• Experience deploying and scaling monolithic web applications built using the Ruby on Rails framework.
• Experience deploying, monitoring, and operating applications deployed on the Heroku PaaS.
• Experience with database administration, specifically Postgresql and maybe a little MongoDB
• Experience monitoring and scaling background services built with Sidekiq Pro and using Redis as a FIFO queue for jobs.

Description

Are you ready to join an established (but also growing and innovating!) tech company that’s making waves in the eLearning space? Are you ready to improve the continuing education process for millions of nurses, physicians, surgeons, attorneys, and other professionals across the country? We’re looking for a talented and experienced fully remote Senior DevOps Engineer for our Path LMS team. Yes – we mean 100% remote, 100% of the time, no backsies. If you’re ready, then our team of 100+ seasoned yet friendly professionals here at Blue Sky eLearn are ready to welcome and collaborate with you!

A Little About Our Architecture

• Ruby / Rails
• Postgresql / Redis / MongoDB
• Sidekiq
• Memcache
• Elasticsearch
• AWS / Terraform
• Docker / Kubernetes / Qovery
• Datadog, Sentry, Corologix for logging/error handling
• Atlassian suite of productivity and project management tools (JIRA, OpsGenie, etc.)
• Github for source control
• Heroku PaaS for app, DB, etc.

What You’ll Be Doing

We have some significant challenges in scaling our application due to the unique traffic flow of multiple, large live streamed events occurring nearing daily. We understand that the root of many of these scaling issues are buried within our code base, but you’ll be able to help us scale in the meantime in order to give us plenty of runway to fix the code. We also need help in migrating our cloud infrastructure and apps off of Heroku to AWS utilizing Terraform and Qovery with assistance from our MAP Partner.

Beyond just our immediate needs, you’ll help us scale and fine tune our architecture, infrastructure, and monitoring. You’ll use your skills to help us expand our capabilities in automating and develop tooling to support our developers as we grow our team even more. We have multiple exciting initiatives on the horizon (like deploying Kubernetes, database scaling, and streamlining our CI/CD infrastructure), and we need a passionate and experienced pro who can help Blue Sky scale and improve through infrastructure and automation.

Here’s a rough run-down of responsibilities:

• Migrate our cloud-based infrastructure for existing and new applications, including our core application and supporting microservices to AWS.
• Develop automated solutions to monitor and alert on performance & stability in our cloud systems.
• Run the DevOps Guild to partner with engineers to implement and improve the current DevOps processes and identify cross-project improvements.
• Champion & implement CI/CD best practices as well as monitor for failures and enforce best practices.
• Help set standards for services and software to streamline test and release cycles and improve system maintenance.
• Support our SDLC through automation, tooling, and monitoring and help build and maintain comprehensive documentation of our infrastructure and tools.
• Constantly reviewing and updating our infrastructure to ensure we are scalable and handling end user demand.
• Collaborate with the support team and engineers to troubleshoot production alerts and both addressing in the short term and preventing in the long term.
• Constantly update alert thresholds to help identify problems and reduce noise.
• Lead and coach the team on how to better monitor solutions, to ensure we have a full understanding of how features/systems are performing.
• Creating and modifying dashboards to show overall platform health.
• Ensure frameworks, and dependencies are up to date and have correct open-source licenses.
• Participate in project planning meetings to share your point of view of system options, impact, risk, and costs vs. benefits. Communicate current operational requirements and development predictions.
• Organize and participate in on-call duties for production issues. Don’t worry – you won’t be on-call all the time for all the things. We simply ask that you be included in the rotation. We activate our on-call system maybe twice a year as most incidents occur during business hours.

Salary and Benefits:

• A salary between $150,000 - $190,000 per year, depending upon your experience, skills, and alignment with our needs
• The opportunity to make a big impact in a small, but growing SaaS company
• A supportive and encouraging team
• A caring, supportive, respectful manager with an engineering background and a people-first approach
• Fully remote, flexible work environment
• The all-important medical, dental, and vision benefits (we pay 100% of the employee’s health insurance premium)
• 100% employer paid short-term disability, life, and AD&D insurance
• A 401K Program to help support your long-term financial plans
• 120 hours annually of paid time off (rolls over! take your unused time with you if you leave), 11 holidays, 5 sick days, paid bereavement, and paid parental leave
• Paid volunteer days so you can support the causes you care about
• Annual professional development reimbursements
• Free access to a wide variety of tech related courses on a service such as Codecademy or Udemy
• If living or working in the San Diego area, access to our headquarters if you prefer hybrid work or simply want to visit and meet some of your team members in-person.

About Blue Sky eLearn:

Founded in San Diego, CA, Blue Sky eLearn provides a full range of learning technologies that include a proprietary learning management system and a complete set of virtual event services. We help organizations capture educational content from either live or virtual settings, then manage and deliver that content to a global audience through our learning platform.

We facilitate thousands of live web events each year for our clients. We currently house over 100,000 learning modules and have electronically issued over two million certificates to online learners.