Platform Observability Engineer – Research Computing

The Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State University; University Park (TX); On-site; USD 69,000 - 103,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

75% tuition discount

DoD SkillBridge partner

Job summary

The Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) at Penn State University seeks a Computing Software Specialist focused on Platform Observability to design, build, and operate observability and reliability infrastructure for high-performance, cloud-native environments. This on-site role emphasizes secure DevSecOps practices and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.

Ideal candidates have strong Linux, automation, and container orchestration skills, plus experience with metrics/logging/tracing stacks.

Qualifications

• DevSecOps tools/practices and Linux-based infrastructure / system administration.
• Infrastructure/automation via configuration management and scripting tools.
• CI/CD pipeline development skills.
• Container orchestration and cloud-native technologies.
• Observability concepts and tooling—collecting and analyzing metrics, logs, and traces.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement secure, automated infrastructure solutions for high-performance computing environments through Agile software development.
• Build and operate observability infrastructure across the three pillars — metrics, logging, and tracing — including dashboards, actionable alerting, and health/performance monitoring.
• Work to maintain and monitor our CI/CD pipelines to allow for frequent, trouble-free deployments of infrastructure code, and deploy/operate workloads in container orchestration environments across bare metal and cloud.
• Assist in performing and reviewing pull requests, writing unit tests, and producing occasional documentation as needed.
• Provide demonstrations of your work to the internal team and occasionally external customers.
• Coordinate with the Agile team to identify risks, issues, requirements, and design solutions for project-level activity on a daily basis.

Skills

DevSecOps

Linux administration

CI/CD pipelines

Container orchestration

Observability tooling

Cloud-native technologies

Scripting

Education

Associate degree or equivalent experience

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Configuration management

Scripting (bash, Python)

CI/CD tooling (Jenkins/GitLab etc.)

Job description

The Applied Research Laboratory (ARL) at Penn State University seeks a Computing Software Specialist focused on Platform Observability to design, build, and operate observability and reliability infrastructure for high-performance, cloud-native environments. This on-site role emphasizes secure DevSecOps practices and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.

Ideal candidates have strong Linux, automation, and container orchestration skills, plus experience with metrics/logging/tracing stacks.