Ascensus is the leading independent technology and service platform powering savings plans across America, providing products and expertise that help nearly 16 million people save for a better today and tomorrow.
Section 1: Position Summary
As a DevOps Principal Engineer, you will provide technical leadership and architectural direction for DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud‑native engineering practices across multiple agile teams. You will partner closely with architects, engineers, security, and infrastructure teams to design scalable, secure, and highly automated delivery platforms that enable teams to ship software faster and more reliably.
This role is ideal for a hands‑on technical leader who enjoys working at both the strategic and tactical levels—setting standards, guiding teams, and occasionally rolling up their sleeves to solve complex engineering problems or lead proofs of concept.
You will also serve as a champion of DevOps and DevSecOps culture, continuously improving developer experience, platform reliability, and operational excellence.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Provide architectural oversight and technical direction for DevOps, CI/CD, and platform engineering practices across multiple scrum teams.
- Partner with Application and Program Architects to align DevOps solutions with business and product strategy.
- Define and evolve standards for build, deployment, infrastructure, and environment management.
- Design reusable reference architectures, templates, and patterns for consistent adoption across teams.
DevOps, CI/CD & Automation
- Lead the design and implementation of automated CI/CD pipelines, including build, test, release, and deployment workflows.
- Establish best practices for source control, branching strategies, and release management.
- Design Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions for provisioning and managing environments.
- Embed security and compliance controls directly into pipelines (DevSecOps).
Cloud, Containers & Platform Engineering
- Drive adoption of containerized and cloud‑native architectures using Kubernetes‑based platforms.
- Ensure platforms meet standards for scalability, resiliency, performance, and cost efficiency.
- Guide teams on service networking, API management, load balancing, and traffic management.
- Support high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity strategies.
Reliability & Production Support
- Provide Level‑3 support for complex production incidents and reliability challenges.
- Partner with operations and engineering teams to improve observability, monitoring, and alerting.
- Continuously identify opportunities to improve system stability and operational maturity.
Mentorship & Culture
- Mentor and coach engineers on DevOps practices, tools, and architectural decision‑making.
- Promote a culture of automation, ownership, continuous improvement, and quality.
- Model strong collaboration, communication, and engineering discipline.
Innovation & Continuous Improvement
- Research emerging tools, technologies, and practices to improve the software delivery lifecycle.
- Build consensus and introduce cost‑effective solutions that increase delivery speed, quality, and reliability.
- Continuously optimize DevOps platforms and processes based on measurable outcomes.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of hands‑on experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, Build & Release, or Engineering Operations roles.
- Proven experience designing and supporting DevOps architecture in enterprise‑scale production environments.
- Strong experience with Agile/Scrum, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery.
- Hands‑on experience deploying and troubleshooting applications in Linux and Windows environments.
- Advanced automation and scripting experience using PowerShell, Python, or similar languages.
- Strong experience with CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins.
- Deep expertise in Docker and Kubernetes.
- Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (e.g., Terraform).
- Proficiency with configuration management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, or Chef.
- Solid understanding of:
- Microservices and cloud‑native architectures
- Networking, load balancing, caching, and service discovery
- Security, secrets management, and certificate management
- High availability, resiliency, and disaster recovery
- Hands‑on experience with AWS cloud services.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence and guide technical direction across teams.
Preferred / Nice to Have
- Experience with observability and monitoring platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Datadog, etc.).
- Experience with NGINX / NGINX Plus, Consul, and Redis.
- Exposure to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices and reliability metrics.
- Experience supporting large enterprise platforms (BPM, CRM, Portals, Content Management).
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
Additional Technical Experience (Nice to Have)
- Java ecosystem experience (JDK, Spring Boot, Struts)
- JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React, or Node.js
- Experience with monolith, microservices, and event‑driven architectures
- Experience with Test‑Driven Development (TDD) and automated testing frameworks
Why Join Us
- Work on large‑scale, mission‑critical systems with real customer impact
- Influence architecture and DevOps strategy across multiple teams
- Partner with strong engineering and architecture leadership
- Be part of a culture that values quality, integrity, and continuous improvement
The national average salary range for this role is $150-200k in base pay, exclusive of any bonuses and benefits. This base salary range represents the low and high end of the salary range for this position. Actual salary offered will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, performance, and internal pay alignment. We do not anticipate that candidates hired will begin at the top of the range however, from time to time, it may occur on a case-by-case basis. Other rewards and benefits may include: 401(k) match, Medical, Dental, Vision, Paid-Time-Off, etc. For more information, please visit careers.ascensus.com/#Benefits.
We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer
Be aware of employment fraud. All email communications from Ascensus or its hiring managers originate from @ascensus.com or @futureplan.com email addresses. We will never ask you for payment or require you to purchase any equipment. If you are suspicious or unsure about validity of a job posting, we strongly encourage you to apply directly through our website.
