Senior DevOps Engineer

We are looking for a DevOps Engineer for a 100% Remote, 12 month +, 1099 contract

No 3rd Party C2Cs Please.

Location: Colombia, South America (work remote supporting US based client/project)

Employment Type: Contract Work, 40 hours weekly

100% Requirement: Must have good verbal & written communication (English)

Overview

The DevOps Engineer owns the platform’s infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipelines, environment management, and release automation. This role designs and operates the Azure environment that runs the simulation in production, and ensures it is equally reliable in development, staging, and pilot environments. The DevOps Engineer’s work is not visible to students, but it underpins everything that is: the pre-warm job that brings services online before 7:00 AM ET, the zero-downtime deployment model that allows a bug fix to the Notification Service without touching Banking, the automated pipeline that gates every merge behind a passing build and test suite, and the monitoring configuration that pages the on-call engineer before a leaderboard stops updating.

Key Responsibilities:

Infrastructure as Code - Author and maintain all Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates (Bicep/ARM) for all Azure environments (production, pilot, staging, development). This includes configuring and optimizing key services like Azure Container Apps (with KEDA autoscaling), Azure SQL Elastic Pool (with geo-replication), and Azure SignalR Service, ensuring reliability and cost efficiency, including scale-to-zero configurations.

CI/CD Pipeline Design and Maintenance - Design, build, and maintain robust CI/CD pipelines for all application binaries and the Expo EAS mobile/web build, ensuring automated promotion through testing and security scans. Implement zero-downtime rolling deployment strategies for production and manage Azure DevOps repository structure, including branch protection and pull request policies.

Environment Management - Manage four distinct Azure environments (development, staging, pilot, production), maintaining environment-specific configuration and coordinating promotions at each sprint milestone. Enforce strict secret management using Azure Key Vault and integrate API/event contract validation into the CI process.

Observability and Monitoring - Design and implement comprehensive observability and monitoring solutions using Application Insights and OpenTelemetry for traces, metrics, and structured logs. Configure actionable alerting thresholds for critical functions (e.g., transaction latency, queue depth) and maintain clear, unambiguous runbooks for incident response.

Security and Compliance Infrastructure - Implement and maintain security infrastructure, including Azure API Management for centralized routing, rate limiting, and WAF policy enforcement. Manage authentication flows using Microsoft Entra External ID (B2C) and ensure compliance with policies like COPPA 2025 through telemetry configuration and pre-commit hook frameworks.

AI and Prompt Engineering Leverage AI and prompt engineering as a core competency to accelerate delivery. Use AI to generate highly structured work products, including all Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), CI/CD pipeline YAML, and monitoring runbooks. Apply advanced prompt engineering techniques to enforce architectural constraints, security rules, and best practices into all generated configurations.

Required Qualifications

· 6+ years of DevOps or platform engineering experience, with at least 3 years on Azure cloud environments using infrastructure-as-code

· Deep proficiency with Azure services: Container Apps (KEDA scaling, ingress, managed environments), API Management, Front Door with WAF, Azure SQL with geo-replication, SignalR Service Management API, Redis Cache, Service Bus, Key Vault, and App Configuration

· Experience authoring Bicep or ARM templates for repeatable, environment-consistent Azure deployments

· Proficiency with Azure DevOps: pipeline YAML authoring, branch policies, artifact management, and release pipeline design

· Experience configuring Application Insights with OpenTelemetry, custom metrics, and alert rules; able to design a monitoring configuration that surfaces actionable signals without alert fatigue

· Familiarity with the Expo EAS build platform and mobile application release pipeline for iOS App Store and Google Play

Preferred Qualifications

· Experience configuring KEDA-based scale-to-zero for cost optimization on a product with a school-hours usage pattern; understands the pre-warm tradeoffs for cold-start mitigation

· Familiarity with Azure Front Door WAF policy authoring and DDoS protection configuration

· Experience implementing NAT Gateway for Container App outbound egress in a high-concurrency environment

· Background in educational technology or other sector where system availability during live events (school simulations, assessments, competitions) is the primary availability constraint

· Experience configuring Azure B2C tenant policies, custom user flows, and OpenID Connect application registrations