DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer

Kipsu is rooted in a simple, yet profound goal: Elevate service professionals to the center of the customer experience, transforming transactional interactions into fully-developed relationships. As one of the Twin Cities' leading tech companies, Kipsu has cultivated a reputation for strong company culture, providing exemplary service to its customer partners, and investing in the growth of their team members. Kipsu was recognized by Star Tribune as a top small company workplace for the last three years.. This role is crucial to the significant, sustainable growth and continued global expansion forecasted for Kipsu's near future.

Summary

The DevOps Engineer role at Kipsu encompasses technical skills in automation, CI/CD, and observability tooling. You will work across teams to understand the incentives of all stakeholders who play a part in the software development lifecycle to improve our technical and people processes.

The DevOps Engineer position possesses the technical and people skills to help development teams smoothly deliver work from the development phase to a stable and secure production environment. You will report to the DevOps Manager at Kipsu. The role occupies a "Player" position by working with more experienced DevOps Engineers and being hands-on with the implementation of automation, infrastructure, and observability initiatives. Like any engineer here, a DevOps Engineer is a "utility player" who wears multiple hats and is expected to operate dynamically within our evolving organization.

We host our systems on AWS, leveraging containerized workflows to deploy and scale our applications. We practice immutable infrastructure, infrastructure as code, and configuration as code. Our talented and enthusiastic team of Software Engineers embraces the culture of DevOps and has expertise with our infrastructure and automation. Team members also run regular working groups in security, database, infrastructure, and front-end technologies to continuously and proactively improve our practices in those areas.

Responsibilities

• Give input into the company's technical strategies and act as a contributor in the following areas:
• Infrastructure - servers (production, development, marketing), network infrastructure, field-deployed hardware
• Architecting and supporting our continuous integration and deployment pipelines
• System monitoring and alerts
• Performance monitoring and testing
• Infrastructure and network security
• Configuration management
• Implement changes to our systems as needed, seeking out the insight of senior team members when tackling larger, "step function" changes to our systems and processes
• Assist with planning and monitoring costs of hosting and scaling our systems - for example, monthly cost monitoring and annual budgeting
• Act as a member of our DevOps team by contributing to standups and refinement to break down complex or ambiguous projects
• Contribute to the design and development of projects from inception to delivery, managing expectations and communicating appropriately throughout
• Communicate technical concepts within Engineering as needed
• Provide input and feedback on requirements, technical design, and code changes, especially in the following areas:
• Cloud architecture, new service design, interservice communication, and resiliency
• Configuration
• New infrastructure & changes to existing infrastructure and networking
• Contribute to designing and refining the development processes and workflows used by Engineering to promote efficiency and reduce friction from development through deployment
• Foster and promote a collaborative culture of learning on the Engineering team
• Create technical documentation, seek feedback, and engage with peers for input
• Respond promptly and appropriately to emergencies and incidents of system instability or other issues
• Knowledge/Skills/Abilities
• Proficiency with a scripting language such as bash or python and programming languages
• Knowledge of AWS or other cloud computing platforms
• Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code or configuration-as-code tools like Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, etc.
• Familiarity with security principles in networking, cloud computing, and web application development
• A "continuous improvement" mindset; independently studying knowledge gap areas and taking advantage of Kipsu's professional development program
• Technical communication skills; ability to interface, collaborate, and partner effectively with other Kipsu teams
• Ability to work on components of complex problems and ensuring they fit into the larger project easily and be continuously deployed to production
• A proactive mindset; communicating early and often around suspected shortfalls in deliverables or timelines
• Resourcefulness; ability to research and answer own questions, using creativity to tackle problems with non-obvious solutions
• Ability to stay positive, be self-motivated, and work through complexity and ambiguity when needed
• Bonus points for proficiency with relational databases and familiarity with data warehouses and big data concepts

Required Experience

• Bachelor's degree, or equivalent experience
• 3+ years of work experience in Software Engineering, DevOps, and/or Software development
• Experience utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) or other cloud computing platforms
• Experience with agile software development methodologies
• Knowledge of automation tools and techniques, and how they can be incorporated into development and deployment processes

One last thing - At Kipsu, we believe that our values, success, and future as a leader in our industry require a vibrant and diverse workforce. This is one of the many challenges we seek to solve, and we are intentional and active in recruiting talent of all identities and building an environment that is inclusive of all backgrounds. We need your contribution to our team. Consider rolling up your sleeves and joining us on our journey and let us know if we can make any accommodations to better empower you.