DevOps Automation Engineer - Blackstone Talent Group

Blackstone Talent Group, an award-winning technology consulting and talent agency is seeking a DevOps Automation Engineer to join our Client's team.

DevOps Engineer

• Performs as an individual contributor in the Agile Release Train (ART) supporting multiple dev teams that build and support exceptional customer-facing applications and internal applications with challenging business use cases and existing legacy and modern systems to install, configure, administer, and automate (CI/CD) application deployment. 
• Your experience and scripting skills will be needed to help us automate the scaling and management of server resources, implement code for zero-downtime deployments, and facilitate DevOps practices. 
• This position offers an outstanding opportunity for a unique individual who possesses a solid development, cloud and on-prem middleware infrastructure, deployment and operations background.

Requirements:

• Minimum 10 years of hands-on experience as a DevOps Automation engineer.
• The candidate should know how to create an Azure DevOps pipelines to script repeatable processes to perform every day and less common configuration management, build and deployment tasks. As such they shall be familiar with DevOps agent tasks to effectively get a desired result. Good engineering skills are important so that all work products are documented and templatized to get wide adoption in the team and developer community.
• The incumbent should be able to understand issues that are being faced by project teams trying to utilize Azure for the first time and be able to translate these requirements into designs that use Azure services to achieve a desired outcome.
• The candidate should have solid understanding of microservice architectures, Azure Kubernetes Services, Azure App. Services, Azure API Management, Azure Key Vault, and Azure App. Config. Deep knowledge of other more esoteric Azure services such AI and analytics is much less important. Knowing how to
• Being able to spot and trade off solutions against cost will be a helpful skill.
• Experience working on various middleware application servers and containers from monolithic to modern versions.
• Apply middleware infrastructure automation code with utmost attention to scalability, security and performance and with an end-to-end mindset from conception to delivery and production support, owning capacity specifications, quality, release deployments and monitoring of production health.
• The candidate must also have some Shell/Perl/Python scripting language experience and be able to use this to implement changes in pipelines.
• Maintains technical documentation on any implementations, README files up-to-date, and status pages of the projects along with Release team handover.
• Collaborates closely with Engineering leadership, Product Managers, Designers, Test Automation and other teams to define, prioritize, sequence and scope middleware around business and functional areas.
• Accurately scopes effort, identifies risks and clearly communicates trade-offs with team members and other stakeholders.
• Instruments infrastructure and application performance monitoring, capacity management, alerting, tools instrumentation and metrics (KPI) management.
• Perform impact assessment of product (hardware, software) upgrades, patching, migration and hot fixes.
• Assists in planning, coordinating, and executing projects across various environments (Regression, Performance, Production and Post-production).
• Supports and collaborates with other Engineers through evaluation, design analysis, and development phases.
• Familiarity on common issues that causes builds/deployments to fail such as out of memory, disk full, missing libraries or security certificates etc.
• Proven track record of handling & troubleshooting various critical Production and nonproduction applications end to end & infrastructure technical issues, providing comprehensive root cause.
• Its preferable that they know Terraform for configuration management knowledge of other Config. Management tooling is useful.
• It will be paramount to be able to pass on knowledge to the immediate DevOps team and our customers to increase the overall cadence of Azure adoption.
• Having worked in a DevOps team before they shall be familiar with the usual agile team rituals.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with the Development, Operations and Release Management teams.
• Educate, and empower AppDev members to use self-service for DevOps tasks.
• Install, and configure middleware.
• Automate, implement, administer, and maintain, continuous development and continuous deployment systems.

Required Skills:

• Linux Administration
• Shell scripting
• Data Serialization Language - YAML
• Podman (Podman Admin, Podman file scripting) (Or Docker /Container)
• Jenkins Admin & CICD Pipeline
• Apache Administration 
• Rundeck (Administration and jobs development)
• Azure Fundamentals (Microsoft Training AZ 900)
• Azure Devops (Repos, Pipelines, Feeds)
• Azure Front Door deployment support
• Azure APIM deployment support
• Azure AKS/Kubernetes
• Helm Charts 
• GitOps - Argo CD
• Azure App Services deployment Support
• Azure Data Factory (ADF) deployment support
• Ansible
• GitHub Repo - Admin
• GitHub Actions
• Datadog - Operator (logging and tracing)

Desired Skills:

• Python scripting
• Weblogic (Administration and Deployment) 
• GitHub Repo - Developer 
• GitHub Advance Security
• ODS/LDAP Administration
• SiteMinder Administration
• Terraform 

Blackstone Talent Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of Blackstone Technology Group, a global IT services and software firm that implements technological solutions across commercial industry verticals and the US Federal Government. Blackstone's global talent augmentation practice was founded in 1998. Blackstone Talent Group has offices in San Francisco, Denver, Houston, Colorado Springs, and Washington, DC. We specialize in providing clients the best talent across a variety of industries and sectors.

EOE of Minorities/Females/Veterans/Disabilities