Senior Dev Ops Engineer

University of Chicago; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work option

On-call rotation

Job summary

Globus Operations at the University of Chicago is seeking a Senior Dev Ops Engineer to design, build, and operate cloud infrastructure behind a research-computing platform. You will work across AWS-based environments, automate deployments, and maintain monitoring and security tooling.

The role emphasizes collaboration with software engineering teams, incident response, and continuous improvement in automation and reliability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field.
• 5–7 years of relevant work experience.
• Experience operating AWS at scale (IAM, VPC, EC2, S3, etc.).
• Experience with Terraform and CloudFormation.
• Proficiency in Python and Bash for automation.

Responsibilities

• Define and document cloud infrastructure architecture across production and development environments.
• Develop, test, document, and maintain software and infrastructure as code for cloud services.
• Maintain and evolve the machine-image and deployment pipelines (Packer, AWS CodeBuild, SSM).
• Maintain monitoring systems (Nagios/NRPE, CloudWatch) and assist migration to Prometheus.
• Administer IAM roles, policies, and cross-account trust across the AWS Organization.
• Deploy, operate, and monitor production Globus services; participate in on-call rotation and post-incident analyses.
• Provide technical consulting to engineering and user-support teams.

Skills

AWS at scale

Terraform

Python

Bash

CloudFormation

Ansible

CI/CD tooling

Linux admin

Networking

Incident management

PagerDuty

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

Nagios/NRPE

CodeBuild

GitHub Actions

SSM

Packer

Job description

## Senior Dev Ops EngineerApply: Hybrid: Chicago, IL: Full time: Posted Today: JR35197**Department**Globus Systems Operations**About the Department**Globus (www.globus.org) is a sustainable, non-profit unit within The University of Chicago delivering solutions to the research community worldwide. Globus develops and provides critical services that support scientific research for governmental, academic, and commercial organizations in a wide range of disciplines including life sciences, physics, and astronomy. We develop and operate commercial-quality, cloud-based software application and platform services used by 10s of thousands of researchers to manage their large–and growing–data management challenges. We have offices located at the NBC Tower in the heart of downtown Chicago and remote employees who work-from-home. Globus, together with Globus Labs, a research group within the University of Chicago, and part of the Data Science and Learning Division at Argonne National Labs, develop and deploy cutting edge technologies to solve new challenges facing the scientific community and enable break-through scientific discoveries.**Job Summary**The Globus Operations team is a 4-5 person group that designs, builds, and operates the cloud infrastructure behind a research-computing platform used by hundreds of institutions worldwide. Globus is a hybrid solution combining AWS-hosted orchestration services with installable applications, delivering identity and access management, data transfer and sharing, and task automation as both software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). As a senior member of this small, high-autonomy team, you will ensure software development and operational best practices are effectively integrated across our services and AWS infrastructure. The team owns an unusually broad estate — an AWS Organization of roughly thirty production accounts, a golden-image pipeline producing around thirty machine images, a self-hosted monitoring platform, a centralized security-logging pipeline, and in-house compliance and security automation — all managed as code in Python, Bash, Terraform, CloudFormation, and Ansible. You will work both collaboratively and independently on complex issues and projects, in some cases making progress under minimal guidance. You will also embed with select software engineering teams to provide operational and infrastructure guidance on best practices. We are looking for a senior engineer equally comfortable improving a build pipeline and debugging a production incident, and who will be a leader and educator both within and across teams.**Responsibilities*** Architecture and Design: Participate in the definition and documentation of cloud infrastructure architecture — networking, monitoring, logging, security, backup, and deployment — across production and development environments. Design new systems and tools, identify opportunities for technical improvement, and review and test solutions to ensure standards are met.* Software Development: Develop, test, document, and maintain high-quality software and infrastructure as code for deploying and operating Globus cloud services, in Python, Bash, Terraform, and CloudFormation. Contribute to shared internal libraries and expand automated test coverage of operational tooling.* Build and Release Automation: Maintain and evolve the machine-image and deployment supply chain — Packer-built AMIs produced through AWS CodeBuild, published via SSM Parameter Store, KMS-encrypted and shared cross-account.* Monitoring and Observability: Maintain the current monitoring and alerting systems (self-hosted Nagios/NRPE with configuration generated from live AWS inventory, CloudWatch alarms, PagerDuty routing) and help in the migration to Prometheus.* Security Operations and Compliance: Contribute to Globus's security plan, controls, monitoring, and reporting. Extend in-house continuous-compliance automation, operate intrusion detection and endpoint protection tooling, maintain hardened machine images.* Identity, Access, and Trust: Administer IAM roles, policies, and cross-account trust across the AWS Organization.* SRE/Operations: Deploy, operate, and monitor production Globus services for high availability. Participate in an on-call rotation, lead incident response, and author root-cause analyses. Identify recurring operational toil and eliminate it through automation and better defaults.* Support: Act as a technical consultant and resource for other team members, including the engineering and user-support teams, assisting with operational issues and troubleshooting.* Designs new systems, features, and tools. Solve complex problems and identify opportunities for technical improvement and performance optimization. Review and test code to ensure appropriate standards are met.* Utilize technical knowledge of existing and emerging technologies, including public cloud offerings from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.* Performs other related work as needed.**Minimum Qualifications****Education:**Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field.**Work Experience:**Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 5-7 years of work experience in a related job discipline.**Certifications:****---****Preferred Qualifications** **Experience:** * Strong experience operating AWS at scale — IAM, VPC (peering, endpoints, security groups), EC2 and Auto Scaling Groups, ECS (EC2 and Fargate), S3, RDS, Route 53, Lambda, Systems Manager, CloudWatch — including cross-account work in a multi-account AWS Organization.* Strong experience building Infrastructure as Code with Terraform (modules, remote state, provider upgrades, reconciling drift against live environments), the ability to maintain and incrementally retire legacy CloudFormation is a plus.* Experience automating infrastructure in Python — maintainable, reusable libraries rather than only scripts, using boto3 — and in Bash.* Building Amazon machine images and the instances they run on, plus Docker containers, and CI/CD tooling (AWS CodeBuild, GitHub Actions).* Linux administration and troubleshooting across Ubuntu and RPM-based distributions, including systemd, syslog/rsyslog, storage, and SSH/sudo configuration.* Networking, firewalls, routing, and DNS; web servers and TLS.* Experience with check-based monitoring, particularly self-hosted Nagios/NRPE, to operate, extend, and update.* Incident management and on-call practice using a platform such as PagerDuty, and writing root-cause analyses. **Preferred Competencies** * Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including clear technical documentation and post-incident analyses.* Strong analytical and problem solving skills, including systematic troubleshooting of distributed systems.* Excellent organizational skills, constant attention to detail, and the ability to prioritize and manage workload to meet critical project milestones and deadlines.* Work both independently and as a team member, taking end-to-end ownership of services with minimal supervision and switching comfortably between long-horizon engineering projects and time-sensitive operational work.* Receptive to feedback; willing to learn and embrace continuous improvement.* Experience with software development fundamentals — code review, automated testing, static analysis — and experience integrating development and deployment frameworks with the monitoring, operations, and orchestration needed to run applications securely and at scale on public cloud platforms. **Working Conditions** * Occasional evening or weekend hours.* Participates in an on-call support rotation.* Option available for remote work with occasional required attendance at in-person meetings. **Application Documents** * Resume (required)* Candidates may be asked to complete a technical coding challenge* Finalists will be required to provide professional references. Reference checks will be conducted prior to an offer being extended. Candidates may also be asked to complete an in-person interview as part of the selection processThe University of Chicago uses AI-assisted tools to streamline and augment some recruitment processes; however, AI is not used to make hiring decisions. When applying, the document(s) **MUST** be uploaded via the **My Experience** page, in the section titled **Application Documents** of the application.**Job Family**Information Technology**Role Impact**Individual Contributor**Scheduled** **Weekly Hours**37.5**Drug Test Required**No**Health Screen Required**No**Motor Vehicle Record Inquiry Required**No**Pay Rate Type**Salary **FLSA Status**Exempt **Pay Range**$150,000.00 - $170,000.00The included pay rate or range represents the University’s good faith estimate of the possible compensation offer for this role at the time of posting.**Benefits Eligible**YesThe University of Chicago offers a wide range of benefits programs and resources for eligible employees, including health, retirement, and paid time off. Information about the benefit offerings can be found in the Benefits Guidebook.**Posting Statement**The University of Chicago is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or expression, national or ethnic origin, shared ancestry, age, status as an individual with a disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or other protected classes under the law. For additional information please see the University's Notice of Nondiscrimination.