Lead DevOps Engineer - Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS

No OPT

Lead Associate Principal, Software Engineering: Lead DevOps Engineer

SALARY: $190k plus 15% bonus

LOCATION: CHICAGO, IL

Hybrid 3 days onsite

Looking for a candidate with strong AWS, EC2, kubernetes, kafka, Jenkins, terraform, ansible, HashiCorp vault. This is a lead devops engineer

• Guides the implementation using CI/CD pipelines in Kubernetes environment
• Directs review, configuration, and execution of Terraform and Ansible automation pipelines delivered by product teams
• Guides the setup of common infrastructure platforms like multi-region Kubernetes and Kafka clusters
• Elicits requirements for application deployment and sizing to manage expected workloads
• Defines and enforces Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error Budgets in collaboration with product teams
• Leads blameless post-mortems and drives resolution of action items to reduce repeat incidents
• Designs and implements observability frameworks covering metrics, logs, and distributed tracing across all platform services

Qualifications:

• [Required] Understanding of Kanban and/or Agile methodologies
• [Required] Familiarity with SRE principles as defined by Google SRE practices (error budgets, toil elimination, reliability hierarchy)
• [Required] Able to succeed in a fast-paced environment with frequent changes
• [Required] Comfortable communicating with both technical and non-technical audiences
• [Required] Self-starter takes initiative to research, learn, and deliver; anticipates the play
• [Required] Team player humble, collaborative, and focused on making the entire team succeed

Technical Skills & Background

• [Required] AWS EC2, Kubernetes, Kafka, Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible, Hashicorp Vault
• [Required] Observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Datadog, or equivalent
• [Required] Incident management platforms and on-call tooling (e.g., PagerDuty, OpsGenie)
• [Required] Microservices and streaming data-intensive application architecture
• [Required] Application architecture, networking, and security in the cloud
• [Required] Setting up platforms in AWS for high-performance requirements
• [Required] Broad experience in API-based development
• [Required] Git and Artifactory for sourcing artifacts
• [Required] Multi-AZ, multi-region failover architecture
• [Required] Chaos engineering principles and tooling (e.g., Chaos Monkey, Gremlin, LitmusChaos)
• [Required] Fluent with different data formats and structures: JSON, Protobuf, Avro
• [Required] SQL and NoSQL databases, in-memory data stores
• [Required] Java/Python/Scala/Golang software development
• [Required] Two or more of the following: web/mobile application development, Unix/Linux environments, event-driven systems, transaction processing systems, distributed and parallel systems, large software system development, security software development, public-cloud platforms
• [Required] Fluent in industry best practices, software patterns, and architecture principles
• [Required] Enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF
• [Required] Ability to define and document architecture strategies, designs, and requirements across all enterprise architecture domains
• [Required] Ability to define service-based, component architectures and demonstrate visualization of enterprise architecture concepts

• [Required] BS degree in Computer Science, similar technical field, or equivalent experience
• [Required] 7+ years of experience building large-scale, data-centric solutions
• [Required] 7+ years of recent experience participating on a DevOps or SRE team, or as product owner for such a team