APTrust Seeks DevOps Engineer

July 31, 2020

Our valued colleague, Christian Dahlhausen, is leaving us and returning with his family to Germany.  I know all APTrust community members join us in wishing Christian the very best for the future.  We will miss him deeply.

This means that we are beginning our search for his successor.  You’ll find details about the opportunity to work with APTrust below.  Please let anyone who may be interested know.

Job Information for APTrust DevOps Engineer opening

UPDATE NOTE: Flavia Ruffner assumed this role on November 9, 2020 with the working title of “DevOps and Security Lead Engineer.”

The University of Virginia is actively seeking candidates for the Academic Preservation Trust Devops Engineer at the University of Virginia Library. The Devops Engineer is responsible for developing and maintaining the APTrust infrastructure and services, in addition managing continuous integration and continuous delivery of its applications. We containerize and deploy with Docker-Compose and Ansible on AWS.

About APTrust : The Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust.org) is a 16-institution consortium of research universities committed to the creation and management of a sustainable environment for digital preservation.  What makes what we do truly sustainable is our collaborative culture and our work together on the challenges that digital stewardship presents.  Our members bring both to the development of an aggregated repository that is helping address one of the greatest challenges facing research libraries and their parent institutions – preventing the permanent loss of scholarship and cultural records being produced today.  APTrust is hosted at and operated by the University of Virginia Library.

What you will do:

  • Ensure that APTrust’s infrastructure remains optimally configured using the most effective, most affordable, most maintainable and most flexible technologies possible to accomplish APTrust’s digital preservation mission. 
  • Work continuously on automating the testing, build, deployment, and provisioning processes. This work is at the heart of APTrust’s ability to rapidly and economically increase and reduce its capacities to accept large-scale deposits of digital material to be preserved, ensuring that the system immediately scales to the needs of APTrust members at the lowest possible cost.
  • Serve as first-line responder to technical issues in running systems and problems reported by depositors. The systems administrator position either fixes these problems or identifies who should fix them.
  • Provide and maintain all of APTrust’s core infrastructure. This includes all servers and preservation storage space.
  • Push new code into production, and revert changes in live systems when necessary.
  • Provide general quality-assurance and testing of new features.
  • Create technical documentation and documentation for APTrust groups and committees.
  • Analyze continuously relevant emerging technologies and service options to help APTrust achieve its goals effectively and with minimal expense.
  • Perform some administration and configuration of external services used by APTrust staff and community. Services include GitHub, Slack, Travis CI, AppVeyor, Trello, Google Suite, Dependabot, GitLab, Authy, Docker Hub and community mailing lists.
  • Create user accounts, work with APTrust Team to define and refine documentation

Required Qualifications:

  • Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, MIS, Computer Engineering or related discipline with three years of relevant work experience OR equivalent combination of experience and education.
  • Strong communication and documentation skills
  • Version control system experience (Git)
  • Experience implementing CI/CD (e.g. TravisCI, Gitlab, AppVeyor)
  • At least two years of experience with the following:
    • Configuration Management experience with Ansible or similar (Chef, Puppet, Salt)
    • AWS operations or similar cloud-service provider experience
    • Docker
    • Docker-Compose
    • Bash
    • GNU Make

Preferred Qualifications:

  • A drive towards automating repetitive tasks (e.g. scripting via Bash, Python, Ruby, etc)
  • Experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform, Cloudformation)
  • 2 years of experience with the any or all of the following:
    • Postgresql
    • Redis
    • NSQ
    • Golang
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Javascript
    • Terraform

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