You will design, build, and operate the AWS infrastructure for a SaaS platform while defining infrastructure-as-code using TypeScript CDK. Additionally, you will own observability, performance scaling, and participate in on-call rotations to ensure platform reliability.
Senior Dev Ops Engineer (Remote Contractor, Nearshore)
About the Role
Kuali runs the administrative backbone for roughly 150 colleges and universities. When our infrastructure is unavailable, research proposals miss federal deadlines, financial closes stall, and students cannot register. Reliability is not an internal engineering preference here; it is a contractual and reputational obligation, and it is tested continuously.
Our DevOps team owns the DevOps processes for Kuali's SaaS platform — the cloud infrastructure it runs on, the infrastructure-as-code that defines it, the self-service paths product teams deploy through, and the observability that tells us how it is behaving. That is the job.
Who are we? Kuali builds software solutions for higher education. We help our customers — colleges & universities — focus on providing a fantastic education to students by decreasing their administrative costs. We work in a competitive space, ripe for innovation, with users ready to be delighted.
As Kuali Engineers, we learn from and teach each other, we practice transparency and empathy, we delight in delivering value to our customers, and we WIN!
We work remotely and have for years. Distributed work is in our bones, with a history of institutions working together across state lines for more than twenty years. Our employees each work in the environment where they’re happiest, from Pennsylvania to Seattle. We work consciously to create a collaborative and healthy remote work culture, and we travel to meet in person a few times each year.
About you
You have operated production at genuine stakes. You have been the person responsible when something important was down.
You automate reflexively and treat sustained toil as a defect rather than a fact of life.
You are calm in incidents. You communicate honestly and keep blame out of the room.
You work autonomously across a distributed team, and you escalate early when you should.
What You'll Own:
Cloud infrastructure & infrastructure-as-code
Design, build, and operate the AWS infrastructure our SaaS platform runs on, across every customer tenant.
Define that infrastructure in code — reusable CDK modules in TypeScript — and own the standards other engineers build against.
Own environment topology, multi-tenant isolation, and disaster recovery design.
Observability
Build monitoring, logging, and tracing that detects real problems and does not cry wolf.
Own golden-signal performance monitoring — latency, traffic, errors, saturation — for the services that matter.
Own audit logging: complete, tamper-evident, and readily produced for audits and customer security reviews.
Performance & scaling
Keep the platform fast and available as customer count and load grow: capacity planning, scaling strategy, and cost-aware sizing.
Diagnose and fix production performance problems at the infrastructure layer.
Participate in on-call for the infrastructure you own, and drive root-cause fixes to completion.
Required Qualifications
4+ years in DevOps, platform, SRE, or infrastructure engineering.
Deep, hands-on AWS experience running production workloads — compute, networking, storage, and managed data services.
Strong infrastructure-as-code experience (CDK or equivalent), building modules others reuse.
Strong Linux, networking, and database operations experience.
Proficiency with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Open Telemetry, ELK, or comparable).
Production on-call experience, with a record of driving systemic fixes rather than repeat repairs.
Clear written English, and working hours overlapping US Mountain Time.
Experience migrating production workloads onto AWS from another platform.
Experience producing infrastructure evidence for SOC 2 or comparable compliance programs.
Cloud cost optimization experience.
At Kuali, we value and respect individuals from all backgrounds, recognizing that a rich tapestry of experiences and perspectives fuels our success as a company and enriches our collective human experience.
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