Senior DevOps Engineer

At ACT Your Work Makes a Difference

Education has power – a power that changes lives forever. It creates opportunities that lift up individuals, their families, and sparks societal change that echoes through generations to come. From our grassroots we have fought the good fight for equity in education, and we remain devoted to helping anyone who struggles to access that power. This is what matters to us and we must do better -- we’ve never been more sure of our purpose.

ACT Education Corp. team members are part of an organization dedicated to an important mission: Helping people achieve education and workplace success.  Advancing the mission internally, by helping team members achieve education and workplace success of their own, is core to our values. ACT values a diverse workplace and is committed to fostering an inclusive, equitable environment in which every team member has an opportunity to grow.

We want our team members to have the well-being and confidence they need to do their best work, in an environment where both they and the company thrive. To support this, our total rewards include company paid life insurance, medical, dental, vision, flexible spending accounts, 401(k) with company contributions, paid holidays, paid time off, and so much more. You can find a comprehensive list of our benefits here.  

We are seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to help us fulfill that mission.

The primary objective of this Senior DevOps Engineer is responsible for infrastructure and software deployment automation as well as architecting and implementing the underlying platform. This position has technical strength to review and choose solutions, implement technology that supports the cloud delivery needs of the organization. Function as part of a team that works closely with Software Development, QA, Performance, and Security teams to achieve streamlined continuous integration/delivery objectives.

The finalist will be hired at the salary and level commensurate with their qualifications. We anticipate offering a market competitive annual salary in the range of $130,000 - $140,000. ACT manages salaries within the range based on relevant factors including, skills, experience, and internal equity. The position is not incentive eligible.

Location: This is a remote position (can also be onsite or hybrid if in Iowa City, Iowa area)

A Day in the Life:

60% - Process and Solution Design, Leadership and Governance

• Work with team members on technical decision making, code reviews and enforcing engineering practices and standards
• Manage cloud implementations, upgrades, migrations, and change requests on client cloud environments with reusable components
• Create, implement, and assist in the development of scripts to automate everyday operations
• Establishes deployment pipelines strategy and implementation
• Creates reference architecture and steers implementation
• Analyze and troubleshoot complex technical problems
• Monitor and maintain multiple (Infrastructure) environments based on ACT requirements
• Remain current on cloud technology developments to take advantage of industry innovations and emerging practices
• Develop and maintain provisioning code for DevOps to support application environments including servers, containers, network, and monitoring
• Guides programmers/developers on technical issues that impact releases, deployment, and delivery

20% - Business Partnering, Relationship and Service Management

• Influence stakeholders and leadership members to ensure solutions are implemented consistently
• Provide cloud experience on the implementation of the technology
• Participate in Problem Solving to address quality issues and concerns to meet the satisfaction of internal customer representatives

20% - Analysis & Requirements Gathering: 

• Identify inconsistencies in the Provider solution and escalate the exceptions for approval
• Provide strategic analysis of a tower technology; identifying linkages and opportunities across the enterprise
• Proactively identify, assess and prioritize technology needs, clearly eliciting, translating, and documenting business, functional and non-functional requirements
• Effectively facilitate discussions with stakeholders and leaders to define clear business requirements for complex, unclear, or large-scale business problems

Role Progression:

• Become familiar with ACT DevOps processes and the systems of repositories, bootstraps, Jenkins, Jira, Bitbucket and ansible that make up that ecosystem.
• Develop and implement roadmaps for our current tools and any new bootstraps.
• Become familiar with ACT Development processes and act as part of scrums as needed.

About You: 

• A minimum of 5 years of progressively responsible IT and business/industry work experience that includes:
  • Experience with continuous integration/delivery automation tools (Jenkins preferred).
  • Experience with infrastructure automation (Ansible preferred).
  • Experience writing automation for at least one cloud-platform (AWS preferred).
  • Experience using software version control (Git preferred).
• Experience in managing cloud providers and solutions in a managed services environment.
• Experience with project management methodologies.
• Demonstrated experience with leading large scale change initiatives, within an IT context, and in a complex, multi-faceted environment.
• Skills and knowledge required for success in this position attained through experience and education (Bachelor’s Degree in computer science or management information systems or related area of study, or an equivalent combination of education and experience from which comparable knowledge and abilities can be acquired.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Knowledge of Linux administration
• Strong programming skills with at least one dynamically typed language such as Python, Perl, or Ruby
• Understanding of the Agile development methodology
• Ability to develop and maintain working relationships across teams
• Good decision making, problem solving and analytical skills
• Highly autonomous and demonstrated ability to take initiative
• Ability to communicate, collaborate and work effectively with individuals inside and outside the organization
• Demonstrated ability to support, mentor, coach and advise team members
• Results-oriented and able to work across the organization
• Ability to lead team through changes and navigate positively in a rapidly transforming organization
• Strong background in ITIL (preferred) or similar process oriented framework
• Ability to innovate as well as apply continuous improvement to existing processes and programs
• Ability to evolve IT architecture and standards
• Knowledge of Infrastructure technologies and business applications, and their relationships

Preferred Qualifications:

• Cloud certifications
• Enterprise software development experience preferred
• Experience with multiple IT Infrastructure technologies and Managed Services providers
• Contributor to an IT industry body or industry related major corporation advisory group

When ACT was founded in 1959, it disrupted the assessment industry with a new approach to helping students better understand their readiness so they could take steps to improve it.  By leveraging our expertise and authority in assessment and research, we will again disrupt the industry—helping more people learn, better measure their progress, and improve their navigation through life’s transitions. 

More than ever before, ACT is fulfilling its mission of helping people achieve education and workplace success. We’re doing it by pushing the boundaries of learning innovation through the work of our people, who we call team members because we’re all in this together.

We know transformation does not come without challenge. That’s why ACT invests in a variety of experiences for team members to strengthen their connections, explore ideas, learn from customers, and celebrate success.

Learn more about working at ACT at act.org!