Development Operations Engineer II

Pay Grade/Pay Range: Minimum: $68,500 - Midpoint: $89,100 (Salaried E11)

Department/Organization: 750501 - Alabama Water Institute (AWI)

Normal Work Schedule: Monday - Friday 8:00am to 5:00pm

Job Summary: The Development Operations Engineer II builds and configures containerization and clusterization under minimal supervision. Monitors applications, servers, system reliability, and compute performance. Implements various development, testing, automation tools, and IT infrastructure under minimal supervision. Assists with the support for the development, test, release, and update processes for development operations operation. Encourages and builds automated processes wherever possible. Tracks and documents changes to code with source control tools. May provide guidance to lower level engineers.

Additional Department Summary: The Alabama Water Institute at the University of Alabama supports CIROH Cyberinfrastructure – R2OHC Platform related research projects. CIROH @ AWI has developed a hybrid and multi-cloud water science environment to support a collaborative experiment to analyze the National Water Model and improve US capacity for critical flood and drought prediction.

This position works closely with a Director, Managers, DevOps Engineers, System/Site Reliability Engineer, Research Software Engineers, hydrologic modelers, and experts in GIS, AI/ML, and databases.

Continuation in this position is contingent upon the availability of external funding derived from research programs or specific projects.

Required Minimum Qualifications: Master's degree and some development operations experience; OR bachelor's degree and two (2) years of development operations experience; OR associate's degree and four (4) years of IT experience to include two (2) years of development operations; OR High school diploma or GED and six (6) years of IT experience to include two (2) years of development operations.

Skills and Knowledge: Strong communication skills for collaboration with researchers and technical teams. Excellent interpersonal skills for collaboration with academics, researchers, engineers, and students. Strong proficiency in AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Solid understanding of Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or CloudFormation). Knowledge of networking principles, object storage, and GCP BigQuery. Working knowledge of High Performance Computing (SLURM). Willing to learn new tools and technologies.

Preferred Qualifications: Master’s degree in computer science or engineering. Experience as a DevOps Engineer or similar role with focus on multi-cloud architecture and HPC. Experience in cloud computing and DevOps practices. Experience with web-based geospatial visualization tools (React-based mapping applications). Experience with SLURM, HPC job scheduling, or scientific computing workflows. Experience contributing to open-source research software or academic publications. Experience leading applications on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure). Experience with Docker containerization, CI/CD pipelines, Git, and GitHub Actions. Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, or similar language.

Background Investigation Statement: Prior to hiring, the final candidate(s) must successfully pass a pre-employment background investigation and information obtained from social media and other internet sources. A prior conviction reported as a result of the background investigation DOES NOT automatically disqualify a candidate from consideration for this position. A candidate with a prior conviction or negative behavioral red flags will receive an individualized review of the prior conviction or negative behavioral red flags before a hiring decision is made.