Title: DevOps Engineer

Location: Remote (U.S.) or Chandler, AZ
Reports to: Engineering Manager
Employment Type: Exempt / Full-Time

About StrongMind

StrongMind is a remote-first education and technology company on a mission to transform learning for students, families, and educators across the country. For more than 25 years, we’ve partnered with schools and districts to deliver innovative, student-centered learning experiences powered by technology, compassion, and bold thinking.

We believe education should be flexible, human, and built for real life. That belief shapes how we design our products, support our partners, and work together as a team. At StrongMind, you’ll find smart people doing meaningful work, a culture rooted in trust and accountability, and leaders who genuinely care about both outcomes and people.

The Team You Will Join

You’ll be part of StrongMind’s Engineering team, working closely with Product Engineering, Release, Security, and Engineering leadership to build and operate a reliable, secure, and increasingly self-service technology platform.

The DevOps team is responsible for the infrastructure, deployment systems, observability, automation, and security practices that keep StrongMind’s products running smoothly. You’ll help mature our AWS and Kubernetes environment while partnering with engineering teams to make it easier and safer to build, deploy, and operate software.

The team culture is collaborative, innovative, and focused on continuous improvement. You’ll have the opportunity to work with modern cloud technologies, shape platform standards, and help build the foundation for a growing DevOps and Platform Engineering function.

The Difference You Will Make

In this role, your work will directly impact the reliability, security, and performance of the technology supporting StrongMind’s learning products and services.

You’ll help strengthen our AWS platform, improve observability, streamline CI/CD and GitOps delivery, and embed security into every layer of how we build, deploy, and operate software. You’ll also contribute to migrating remaining Azure services to AWS and creating the automation, documentation, and standards that allow our engineering teams to move faster with confidence.

Your work will help make quality, security, and operational excellence part of the development process—not something addressed after the fact.

A Typical Day Looks Like

While no two days are exactly the same, you can expect to:

• Own and evolve AWS infrastructure, including EKS clusters, networking, DNS, secrets management, and related cloud services.
• Harden production environments by improving cluster reliability, autoscaling, ingress, load balancing, health checks, and security controls.
• Maintain and expand Infrastructure-as-Code using Pulumi, ensuring infrastructure is versioned, repeatable, policy-checked, and increasingly self-service.
• Build and standardize CI/CD and GitOps workflows using GitHub Actions, Argo CD, and Kargo.
• Improve deployment strategies, including progressive promotion, blue/green deployments, canary releases, and automated rollback.
• Build and maintain Docker images and deployment workflows across Go, Ruby, Python, TypeScript, and C#/.NET applications.
• Develop observability using OpenTelemetry and Datadog, including centralized logging, distributed tracing, monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and SLOs/SLIs.
• Strengthen DevSecOps practices through automated dependency, container, secrets, static analysis, and Infrastructure-as-Code scanning.
• Monitor and remediate cloud security findings while maintaining strong identity, encryption, network, and secrets-management practices.
• Support incident response, post-incident learning, and improvements that increase uptime and reduce time to resolution.
• Partner with engineering teams to improve service testability, deployment patterns, observability, and self-service infrastructure.
• Support the migration of remaining Azure services to AWS, including containerization, routing, and database migration.
• Write architecture decision records, runbooks, and documentation that establish clear standards for operating the platform.
• Use automation and AI-enabled tools to improve workflows, solve problems, and increase efficiency while applying sound technical judgment.

This role balances hands-on engineering, collaboration, automation, and strategic platform thinking and is well-suited for someone who enjoys solving complex infrastructure problems, building scalable systems, and improving how teams work.

Your Expertise Includes

We’re looking for someone who brings:

• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, or a closely related field.
• Strong hands-on AWS experience, including EKS, RDS/Aurora, SQS/SNS, Lambda, EventBridge, IAM, VPC networking, S3, and ECR.
• Production Kubernetes experience, including workload scheduling, resource management, and GitOps-based delivery.
• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience for managing multi-environment infrastructure; experience with Pulumi is preferred.
• Experience with Kubernetes and GitOps tools such as Helm, Kustomize, Argo CD, and similar deployment platforms.
• Strong CI/CD experience with GitHub Actions across multiple programming languages and application stacks.
• Experience building and managing Docker images, including multi-stage builds, base image management, and runtime configuration.
• Solid networking fundamentals, including VPC design, security groups, DNS, load balancing, Kubernetes ingress, and CDN configuration.
• Working knowledge of cloud security, including IAM, SCPs, KMS, ACM, secrets management, and cloud security posture management.
• Proven experience improving observability, reliability, uptime, and operational maturity in production environments.
• Experience managing relational databases, particularly RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL, including performance tuning and backup strategies.
• Comfort owning infrastructure work with autonomy and minimal hand-holding.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, documentation, and collaboration skills.

Bonus points if you also have:

• Experience migrating workloads from Azure or another cloud platform to AWS.
• Familiarity with Azure services such as App Service, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Service Bus, Event Grid, Key Vault, or Application Insights.
• Experience with event-driven architectures using EventBridge, SQS/SNS, or Kinesis.
• Experience operating an API gateway such as Kong and managing WAF/CDN protections.
• Experience with FinOps, including cloud cost optimization, right-sizing, and reserved capacity.
• Experience with DevSecOps tools such as Trivy, Dependabot, Snyk, or Checkov.
• Experience with commercial security platforms such as Wiz, CrowdStrike, or Palo Alto Networks.
• SOC 2 or other compliance program experience, or a security certification such as AWS Security Specialty or CISSP.
• Experience with EdTech platforms or integration standards such as Canvas LMS, PowerSchool, Clever, LTI, or OneRoster.
• Experience with data pipeline tooling such as Dagster or AWS Glue.
• Experience mentoring or onboarding engineers onto a DevOps or Platform Engineering team.

Our Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging

At StrongMind, we believe the best ideas come from bringing together people with different perspectives, experiences, and ways of thinking. A diverse and inclusive workplace fuels creativity, strengthens collaboration, and helps us build better solutions for the students, families, and communities we serve.

We are committed to welcoming a broad range of talent and encouraging all qualified individuals to apply. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and is empowered to contribute, grow, and do meaningful work.

How We’ll Take Care of You

We believe that when people feel supported, they do their best work. At StrongMind, your well-being isn’t a perk—it’s part of our culture.

Our commitment to you includes:

• A competitive total compensation package, including medical, dental, vision, and voluntary benefits
• Well-being that works for real life—from an on-site gym, virtual wellness programs, and wellness coaching to flexible work options for select roles, because your well-being fuels your brilliance
• Unlimited PTO for exempt roles, plus additional “life happens” days when you need flexibility
• A fully paid holiday week off at Christmas, so you can truly rest, reset, and reconnect
• Recognition and rewards that celebrate birthdays, meaningful milestones, legendary work, and community service hours that let you give back
• Quarterly Town Halls that keep communication transparent, honest, and human
• Annual social events and traditions we genuinely look forward to—like Halloween celebrations, Wellness Fairs, and other moments that bring our community together

We’re intentional about building a workplace where people feel valued, connected, and empowered to thrive—at work and beyond.

Additional Info:

We welcome all qualified candidates eligible to work in the United States. At this time, we are unable to sponsor visas.

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and provide consideration to all applicants regardless of race, religion, color, sex, gender, national origin, age, veteran status, marital status, or disability protected by law.