Senior DevOps Engineer

Senior DevOps Engineer (Production Support)
Chicago, IL

Role Summary 

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior DevOps Engineer (Production Support) with deep expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and cloud-native platforms. This role will focus on operating, stabilizing, and continuously improving production environments, ensuring high availability, performance, and scalability of mission-critical applications. 

The ideal candidate is a hands-on DevOps/SRE professional who thrives in fast-paced production environments and can automate, troubleshoot, and optimize distributed systems at scale. 

You will work extensively with AWS, Kubernetes (Rancher), Jenkins, GitHub, Terraform, Kafka, Harness, and Python while partnering with engineering, platform, and product teams. 

Key Responsibilities 

Production Operations & Reliability 

Provide L2/L3 production support for cloud-native applications running on AWS and Kubernetes. 

Own incident triage, root cause analysis (RCA), and resolution for high-severity production issues. 

Participate in on-call rotations and drive post-incident improvements. 

Improve system reliability, resilience, and observability using SRE best practices. 

AWS & Cloud Infrastructure 

Design and operate scalable AWS environments using: 

EC2, EKS, VPC, ALB/NLB 

S3, RDS, DynamoDB 

IAM, CloudWatch, EventBridge 

Optimize cloud cost, performance, and security posture. 

Implement multi-account, multi-region architectures. 

Kubernetes & Container Platforms 

Manage and operate Kubernetes clusters (Rancher-managed or EKS). 

Troubleshoot: 

Pod failures 

Resource constraints 

Networking issues (CNI, ingress) 

Stateful workloads 

Improve: 

Autoscaling strategies 

Cluster resilience 

Deployment reliability 

CI/CD & Developer Enablement 

Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines using: 

Jenkins 

GitHub Actions 

Harness (preferred) 

Implement: 

Blue/green and canary deployments 

GitOps workflows 

Automated rollbacks 

Enable developer self-service deployment platforms. 

Infrastructure as Code & Automation 

Build and maintain infrastructure using: 

Terraform (primary) 

Python automation 

Develop reusable: 

IaC modules 

Platform templates 

Deployment accelerators 

Automate provisioning, scaling, and recovery workflows. 

Kafka & Streaming Platforms 

Design and manage Kafka infrastructure including: 

Clusters, topics, brokers 

Producers/consumers 

Schema evolution 

Ensure: 

High availability 

Throughput optimization 

Secure connectivity 

Integrate Kafka with AWS and Kubernetes ecosystems. 

Observability & Platform Health 

Implement monitoring and alerting using: 

CloudWatch / Splunk Observability 

Define: 

SLIs/SLOs 

Alerting thresholds 

Runbooks 

Proactively identify bottlenecks and prevent outages. 

Security & Compliance 

Implement DevSecOps best practices: 

Secrets management 

IAM least privilege 

Container scanning 

Supply chain security 

Ensure infrastructure adheres to security and compliance standards. 

Collaboration & Continuous Improvement 

Partner with development teams to: 

Improve deployment maturity 

Reduce operational toil 

Increase automation coverage 

Drive: 

Platform standardization 

Developer experience improvements 

Operational excellence initiatives 

Qualifications 

Experience 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxyears in DevOps / SRE / Production Support roles 

Strong experience managing production-grade cloud environments 

Proven track record handling live incident management 

Technical Skills 

Must Have 

AWS (deep hands-on) 

Kubernetes (EKS/Rancher) 

Splunk 

Terraform 

Jenkins / GitHub 

Kafka 

Python or Shell scripting 

Linux systems expertise 

Good to Have 

Harness CI/CD 

GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux) 

Service mesh (Istio/Linkerd) 

Observability tools (New Relic, Datadog, Prometheus) 

Platform engineering mindset