About the job
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is a multi-mission science and operations center for NASA’s flagship observatories. The Cloud Center of Excellence at STScI is seeking a Senior AWS Cloud SysOps/DevOps Engineer to join our team working on NASA flagship Space Telescope missions that are revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. Applicants must be a U.S. citizen or Permanent Resident for ITAR compliance.
This position can support hybrid work. Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to our local market. (MD, DE, VA, PA, DC & WV).
In this role, you’ll support cloud infrastructure automation initiatives and leverage DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines to implement robust automation and monitoring systems using modern engineering and operations frameworks for the AWS cloud applications and environment. This will support our space observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman). Roman is a survey telescope slated for launch in late 2026 and is expected to generate 20 PB of data in 5 years.
The data from Roman will primarily be processed in the Cloud. Additionally, a Science Platform hosted in the Cloud will enable transformational science with Roman data by providing a rich computing environment that allows broad, low-barrier access to data, computing, and software resources.
STScI also hosts the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), which contains data from more than 20 missions. In this role, you will collaborate with cross-functional teams to design, deploy, and maintain secure cloud architectures, automate security processes, and ensure compliance with industry regulations and best practices. Your expertise in AWS cloud infrastructure automation, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and DevOps principles will be vital in supporting Roman and enabling world-class scientific discoveries through these pioneering telescope programs.
This role will be part of the DevOps/Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) team, responsible for helping roll out new CI/CD templates to the engineering teams and the continued improvement of these pipelines. You will work closely with the Science, Engineering, IT, Quality Assurance, Security, and Site Reliability Engineering teams to improve automation and the adoption of CI/CD best practices.
Key Responsibilities
- Identity & Access Management: Design and implement solutions to drive improvements in IAM, emphasizing automation, efficiency, and scalability.
- IAM Asset Management: Build and review IAM assets, including policies for application and DevOps teams, and enhance capabilities within the existing IAM framework.
- System Performance: Analyze, tune, and plan capacity for STScI’s systems residing in AWS. Investigate, analyze, test, and recommend technology improvements, best practices, standardization, scaling, upgrades, cost optimizations, and modifications to the infrastructure and cloud services.
- Operating Systems Support: Perform complex analysis to acquire, install, modify, and support operating systems, software, databases, scripts, utilities, tools, and security standards.
- Automation Management: Lead the administration and systems management with automation, including Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) and containers in development, test, and production cloud-hosted environments.
- Monitoring and Response: Proactively monitor the health and utilization of AWS resources using Amazon CloudWatch, DataDog, etc., and develop automated event-based response systems as needed.
- Infrastructure Automation: Build, deploy, and support automation for cloud instances and container frameworks, including regular maintenance, monitoring, patching, compliance management, and ensuring a secure environment.
- IaC Management: Build, deploy, and manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with automation for infrastructure running on AWS cloud.
- Issue Resolution: Work directly with AWS support engineers to identify and resolve issues.
Technical Skills And Abilities
- AWS Cloud Services: Significant hands-on experience and an understanding of best practices with AWS cloud services, including infrastructure, security, networking, databases, code pipelines, and cost optimization.
- Identity Provider Solutions: Experience using Identity Provider solutions like Active Directory, Okta, or PingIdentity and SSO.
- Linux & AWS Services: Strong knowledge of Linux and AWS services such as Compute, RDS, Container, VPC, Storage Services, Security Groups, High Availability, S3, CloudWatch, etc., including zero trust infrastructure management.
- Scripting Skills: Required scripting skills (shell scripts; Python preferred) and familiarity with CloudFormation, Terraform, JSON, and YAML.
- Containerization: Proficient knowledge of containerization and container orchestration.
- CI/CD Tools: Experience with Git, Jenkins, GitLab CI, and/or AWS developer tools is required.
- Infrastructure Automation: Experience with AWS infrastructure and automation, including VPCs, Security Groups, IAM, etc.
- IaC Modules: Experience developing IaC modules for AWS multi-account framework and AWS organizations.
- CI/CD Knowledge: Knowledge of CI/CD for DevOps is a plus.
Required Education And Experience
- A Bachelor’s in Computer Science or equivalent. Minimum 8 years of extensive experience in a related IT, DevOps or application development role with hands-on AWS cloud infrastructure management experience.
Preferred Certifications
- AWS Certification “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate,” “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate,” or “AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional,” or similar certifications are preferred.
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