Staff Platform Engineer

Department
BSD CTD - Platform Engineering - GDC

Job Summary
Platform (aka DevOps) Engineers provide production support, production monitoring, CI/CD design & implementation, security automation, & AI/ML infrastructure management across the open-source software platforms CTDS develops and operates for translational data science. Production support includes triaging, researching, communicating, and addressing production incidents. For monitoring, staff wrangle disparate system monitoring assets and develop common analytics to inform optimization define benchmarks and confidence intervals and to forecast, proactively mitigating production incidents. CI/CD pipelines are for hybrid cloud architecture on-premises and in commercial cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Additionally, the position is responsible for AI/ML research infrastructure, including managing and optimizing on-premises GPU resources and AWS cloud services such as Bedrock and SageMaker. Responsibilities include deploying, monitoring, and maintaining machine learning models for inference, optimizing model and hardware performance, troubleshooting AI/ML solutions, and integrating them within the broader application environment to support research and production workflows.

Responsibilities

• Responsible for design and implementation of top priority technical tasks and timely delivery of such tasks, meeting and helping define the required level of quality.
• Participation in complex and challenging activities, including design and implementation.
• Responsible for a scope of significant size critical to the team's success.
• Provide technical leadership and effectively mentor interns and less experienced members.
• Actively participate in the hiring process and provide fair and productive interview feedback.
• Negotiate complex decisions, present options and persuasively advocate for optimal technical solutions, internally and externally.
• Utilizes technical knowledge of existing and emerging technologies, including public cloud offerings from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Acts as a technical consultant and resource for faculty research, teaching, and/or administrative projects.
• Performs other related work as needed.

Minimum Qualifications

Education:
Minimum requirements include a college or university degree in related field.

Work Experience:
Minimum requirements include knowledge and skills developed through 5-7 years of work experience in a related job discipline.

Certifications:

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Preferred Qualifications

Education:

• Advanced degree in computer science, mathematics, statistics, engineering, or a relevant quantitative field strongly preferred.

Experience:

• 6+ years professional experience as a system or DevOps engineer or demonstrated skills and qualifications through projects, initiatives, or outstanding performance.
• Hands-on scripting experience (Bash, Python, or other dynamic language).
• Unix/Linux programming or system administration experience.
• Experience with OpenStack and AWS p(EC2/S3) cloud technologies.
• Experience with configuration management utility (Chef, Puppet, Ansible).
• Experience with F5 or other load balancing technologies (Nginx, AWS ELB/ALB, etc.).
• Experience with source control and build systems (SVN, Git, Jenkins, etc.).
• Experience with container based deployment (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with log aggregation tools (ELK stack, Splunk).
• Experience with security frameworks (FISMA, NIST, FIPS).
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Openstack), CI/CD, and Agile methodologies.
• Experience leading DevOps initiatives and process improvement.
• Experience with deploying, maintaining, and monitoring AI/ML models and infrastructure.

Preferred Competencies

• Ability to collaborate with team members and help define guidelines and best practices and ensuring accountability for deliverables and outcomes.
• Ability to take and provide constructive and helpful input and feedback on technical issues.
• Ability to negotiate complex decisions, present options and persuasively advocate for optimal technical solutions, internally and externally.
• In-depth knowledge in most technical areas of major projects and the core DevOps technology scope.
• Considered a Subject Matter Expert of most DevOps technology and solutions.
• Ability to take multiple complex tasks and break them into smaller ones, estimating the effort needed to complete them, prioritizing them appropriately, and ensuring the completion of each task, meeting the required level of quality.
• Ability to work in a collaborative team and ensure accountability for deliverables and outcomes.
• Ability to prioritize and manage workload to meet project milestones and deadlines.

Application Documents

• Resume/CV (required)
• Cover Letter (preferred)

When applying, the document(s) MUST be uploaded via the My Experience page, in the section titled Application Documents of the application.

Job Family
Information Technology

Role Impact
Individual Contributor

Scheduled Weekly Hours
40

Drug Test Required
No

Health Screen Required
No

Motor Vehicle Record Inquiry Required
No

Pay Rate Type
Salary

FLSA Status
Exempt

Pay Range
$100,000.00 - $140,000.00
The included pay rate or range represents the University's good faith estimate of the possible compensation offer for this role at the time of posting.

Benefits Eligible
Yes
The University of Chicago offers a wide range of benefits programs and resources for eligible employees, including health, retirement, and paid time off. Information about the benefit offerings can be found in the Benefits Guidebook.