Senior Devops Engineer Jobs in Virginia

INTRODUCTION

Stand Together is a philanthropic community that helps America’s boldest changemakers tackle the root causes of our country’s biggest problems, from education to the economy, broken communities, and toxic division, among dozens of other pressing issues. We provide our partners with access to resources including funding, thought leadership, a network of peers, and a playbook for applying proven principles to transform lives and society. We are seeking a Senior DevOps Lead Engineer to lead and evolve the DevOps function for the Be The People digital ecosystem — a suite of highly visible, public-facing applications. This is a senior individual contributor role with strong technical leadership expectations, responsible for environments, CI/CD pipelines, release readiness, and operational guardrails. This role operates with a high degree of autonomy and judgment, balancing delivery velocity with reliability, security, and long-term maintainability. You will collaborate with software engineers, data engineers, architects, cloud engineers, and product stakeholders to tackle some of society's most pressing challenges.

ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES

DevOps & Platform Ownership
- Lead the DevOps function end-to-end for Be The People, and contribute to how applications are assembled, tested, released, and operated
- Lead creation and lifecycle management of environments, including spinning up new environments and coordinating content and data seeding
- Contribute to the design and evolution of platform architecture with an emphasis on scalability, resilience, and cost efficiency
- Establish cloud standards and manage cloud operations in cooperation with Cloud Engineering.

CI/CD & Automation
- Design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions as the primary orchestrator
- Establish reusable workflow templates and best practices without introducing unnecessary complexity
- Apply Infrastructure-as-Code discipline — including versioning, promotion across environments, and drift prevention — using tools such as Terraform, Terragrunt, CDK, Ansible, or CloudFormation
- Develop and debug Python, Ansible Playbooks, Terraform, and other infrastructure-as-code tooling

Release Readiness & Operational Guardrails
- Own or steward the release management function, acting as a go/no-go checkpoint to ensure required testing has occurred, stakeholder sign-offs are complete, and risks are clearly surfaced
- Participate in production incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident learning
- Construct a resilient ecosystem capable of quickly restoring services, and participate in developing the disaster recovery playbook for Be The People

Observability, Reliability & Security
- Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability for production systems using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, or ELK Stack
- Participate in the development, implementation, and automation of security policies
- Apply baseline security best practices across infrastructure and pipelines
- Apply SRE-inspired practices such as defining SLIs/SLOs and designing systems operable by teams beyond DevOps

Cloud, CDN & Infrastructure
- Deeply understand CDN configuration (e.g., Cloudflare), including caching layers and their impact on testing and production behavior
- Be competent in DNS concepts and troubleshooting, even if DNS ownership resides elsewhere
- Optimize cloud infrastructure (AWS primary; familiarity with Azure and GCP a plus) for performance, reliability, and cost
- Provide architectural guidance and design recommendations for cloud assets, resource consolidation, and standardized practices

Testing & Quality Enablement
- Help shape test automation strategy, recognizing AI-assisted testing and organizational QA maturity constraints
- Ensure testing happens and is validated, rather than personally writing all tests
- Partner with the testing team on test automation, test tracking, and incorporate into the release process
- Embed quality checks as first-class controls in delivery pipelines

Technical Leadership & Collaboration
- Serve as a technical leader who leads through influence rather than authority
- Collaborate cross-functionally with application, infrastructure, and data teams
- Participate in technical screening and interview panels, including short, high-signal technical screens
- Coach and mentor engineers on cloud and DevOps best practices, raising overall DevOps maturity
- Create and maintain durable documentation, including environment definitions, deployment processes, and runbooks

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

Experience

- 10+ years of relevant DevOps and Cloud Engineering experience — this is a senior-level role not suitable for junior or mid-level candidates
- Proven experience operating production systems with real customer and business impact
- Minimum 5 years of professional Cloud Engineering background, with deep AWS expertise

Technical Skills

- CI/CD: GitHub Actions (primary), plus experience with CircleCI, Jenkins, Bamboo, Harness.io, or AWS CodePipeline
- Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, AWS CDK, Serverless Stack (SST), Ansible Playbooks, or CloudFormation
- Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Rancher
- Cloud Platforms: AWS (EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, DocumentDB, Lambda, SQS, SNS, ECS, ECR, Elastic Load Balancers, S3, Amplify, CodeBuild); familiarity with Azure, Google Cloud, and Acquia
- CDN & Networking: Cloudflare; understanding of DNS, Custom TCP, SSH, HTTPS, UDP, VPNs, Load Balancing, and Firewalls
- Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, ELK Stack, or Graylog
- Databases: DocumentDB / MongoDB (operational context); SQL background advantageous
- Security: Secure SDLC concepts including secrets management, scanning, and least-privilege access
- Languages: Python, PowerShell, JavaScript, or Java (for Lambda and scripting)
- Version Control: Git and GitHub
- Configuration Management: Ansible, Chef, or Puppet
- Project Management, Sprint Planning & Release Planning: Jira and Confluence

Leadership & Soft Skills

- Strong judgment and ownership — comfortable saying 'no' or 'not yet' when appropriate
- Formal people-management experience is not required; demonstrated technical leadership through influence is expected
- Ability to communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders around risk and tradeoffs
- Comfortable with command-line tools and the Linux/Unix environment
- Enthusiasm to contribute to Stand Together's vision and principled approach to solving problems, and a commitment to stewarding our culture, which champions values including transformation and innovation, entrepreneurialism, humility, and respect.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- AWS or Azure certifications (Certified Developer, DevOps Engineer, Solutions Architect, Data Analytics, or Database)
- Experience with regulated or compliance-sensitive environments
- Exposure to multi-product or platform organizations
- Experience modernizing legacy delivery practices
- Background in building and deploying web applications from source code
- DevSecOps experience including code analysis, vulnerability management, regulatory compliance, security policy monitoring, to help build a security-aware culture

WHAT WE OFFER

- Competitive benefits: Enjoy a 6% 401(k) match with immediate vesting, flexible time off, comprehensive health and dental plans, plus wellness and mental health support through Peloton and Talkspace.
- A meaningful career: Join a passionate community of over 1,300 employees dedicated to improving lives and driving innovative solutions to complex social challenges.
- Commitment to growth: Thrive in a non-hierarchical environment that empowers employees to discover, develop and apply their unique talents.
- Competitive compensation: Our approach rewards the value you create through competitive salaries and bonus opportunities, allowing you to share in the success you help drive.

OUR VALUES:

Working for an organization within the Stand Together philanthropic community is different from many other places. The culture is deeply rooted in Principle Based Management® (PBM®), a framework guided by the principles that drive human progress, such as dignity, openness, and bottom-up empowerment. PBM® empowers employees to be entrepreneurial, to innovate, and to continually drive transformation. We believe diversity fuels creativity, broadens knowledge, and helps drive success. That is why we’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and strive to treat all employees and applicants with honesty, dignity, and respect.