Pay Grade/Pay Range:  Minimum: $62,300 - Midpoint: $81,000 (Salaried E10)

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

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

Note to Applicants: Position is eligible for hybrid work subject to University policy. 

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

Additional Department Summary: The Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH) at the Alabama Water Institute (AWI) is developing 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 work closely with the DevOps Manager, System/Site Reliability Engineer, Research Software Engineers, hydrologic modelers, and experts in GIS, AI/ML, and databases and provides hydrologic model software development support for this project.

Continuation in this position is contingent upon availability of external funding.

Required Minimum Qualifications: Bachelor's degree; OR associate's degree and two (2) years of IT experience; OR high school diploma or GED and four (4) years of IT experience.

Skills and Knowledge: Excellent interpersonal skills for collaboration with academics, researchers, engineers, and students. Strong communication skills for collaboration with researchers and technical teams. Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, or similar language. Strong proficiency in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Solid understanding of Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or CloudFormation). Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, Git, GitHub Actions, and Agile methodologies. Knowledge of networking principles, object storage, and GCP BigQuery. Willing to learn new tools and technologies.

Preferred Qualifications: Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field. 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 (e.g., Tethys, 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 with Docker containerization and Kubernetes. Experience with Nginx, Supervisor, and HPC/cloud performance benchmarking.

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.

About University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

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