Platform DevEx Engineer

About the role

Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) is searching for Platform DevEx Engineer to support our work for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), an institute of the National Institutes of Health. This opportunity is full time and onsite/remote at the NCBI in Bethesda, MD and/or remote.

NCBI is part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at National Institutes of Health (NIH). NCBI advances science and public health by providing free access to biomedical literature and genomic data over the web, making it one of the 400 top most-visited sites in the world.

NCBI's diverse staff of smart, talented, and deeply technical people collaborate to build critically valuable services for researchers, physicians, educators, students, and the general public. For example, NCBI develops and delivers PubMed, an index of over 29 million biomedical research abstracts, often with links to full-text literature and supporting data.

The Platform Services team builds and maintains the systems that software developers across NCBI use to ensure that they are consistently pushing and deploying high quality code that complies with Federal Standards for application security and mature code practices. We're involved in the entire development lifecycle including:

• Tools for creating and setting up new projects consistently across the org.
• CI pipelines and build tools for consistent expectations across languages and application frameworks
• Testing frameworks and metrics to assure only quality and secure code can be sent to production.
• Deployment and publishing pipelines to bring applications to their users in on-premises and cloud environments, and to provide public access to Open Source projects.
• Integrations for the secure management of deployment parameters, credentials, and more.
• Tooling to allow applications to communicate asynchronously, monitor performance metrics, debug live applications and much more.

What you'll do

As an Platform DevEx engineer, you'll be a part of a cross-functional team of around 20, building and maintaining tools and systems that allow developers across NCBI to build, deploy, and maintain software and web services that are used around the world.

You should be prepared to work on

• GitLab CI pipeline configuration, templates, and components to build a standardized ecosystem for developers across the organization to use for their applications, in many languages, from C++ to Scala, Kotlin, and Python.
• Python applications, scripts, and libraries to provide interfaces for DevOps and customer tools to manage builds, deployments, and more.
• Kubernetes configuration templates using the YTT templating language to create and maintain customizable patterns for consistent deployments across application teams
• Debugging deployments on Kubernetes distributions like Openshift and Anthos and using plugins like ArgoCD, Istio, and more.
• Documentation knowledge bases for each component project and the DevEx platform as a whole, in READMEs and on Confluence.
• Leading smaller projects within the DevEx teams to add new capabilities to the platform.

What we look for

While we have roles at all levels of experience, we are looking for proactive developers with some experience building software or maintaining DevOps infrastructure and a strong interest in learning more.

Required Skills

• Strong coding fluency in at least one programming language. NCBI uses Python, C++, JavaScript/Typescript, some Kotlin & Scala, and small amounts of Golang and Rust.
• A working knowledge of Linux systems and the command line
• Familiarity with source control, CI/CD pipelines, package publishing, and containerization

Preferred skills and experience

• Experience developing CLI applications
• Experience building and deploying web APIs to cloud services or Kubernetes
• Familiarity with container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or Nomad, and Kubernetes distributions like OpenShift Container Platform, Anthos, GKE, AKS, EKS, etc.
• Familiarity with observability tools like Prometheus, the EFK (ElasticSearch, fluentd, Kibana) or TIGK (Telegraph InfluxDB, Grafana, Kapacitor) stacks, DataDog, Sensu, Jaeger, Sentry, or OpsGenie.
• Familiarity with GitLab CI/CD pipelines

Bonus skills and experience

• Experience building high availability applications
• Experience configuring multi-tenent Kubernetes clusters
• Familiarity with Service Mesh techlolgies like Istio or Linkerd
• Familiarity with event bus technologies like Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS Kenesis, etc.
• Familiarity with data processing and distributed computing tools like Apache Spark or Airflow
• Familiarity with secret management tools like Hashicorp Vault, Azure KeyVault, Google Secret Manager, etc.

Benefits and Salary

• We attract the best people in the business with our competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, 401k plan with employer contribution, paid holidays, vacation, and tuition reimbursement.
• We offer a competitive salary commensurate with experience and location. If you enjoy being a part of a high performing, professional service and technology focused organization, please apply today!