Senior DevOps Engineer (Higher Education Admissions)

Imagine a world where educational institutions, including medical schools, engineering schools, business schools, teachers' colleges, and others, train and graduate a diverse range of students who bring professionalism, empathy, integrity, cultural competency, and additional human skills to their jobs.

That’s the world we are on a mission to build.

Acuity Insight’s Casper Engineering team builds software that enables Higher Education admission teams to see beyond book smarts and discover high-potential applicants based on their levels of social intelligence and professionalism.

Here’s a chance to join the Casper Engineering team as its first dedicated DevOps Engineer.

In this role, you get to help us further adopt AWS as our cloud platform of choice. Developers on the Casper team will be your customers. You’ll support them as we scale our assessment platform beyond the 150,000+ annual applicants using it today.

It’s a chance to help automate the management of services deployed worldwide. You’ll design the internal tools, processes, and workflows to standardize the developer experience and facilitate efficient, secure, and rapid software delivery. Tasks include building deployment pipelines, securing AWS accounts, and developing monitoring tools.

You also get to partner with other DevOps-focused team members as part of our Analytics and One45 Engineering teams. You’ll work together on various projects and tech stacks and build shared infrastructure over time.

This opportunity is best suited to an engineer who:

• Has significant experience with AWS
• Has designed and maintained high traffic applications
• Understands infrastructure-as-code processes and tools (such as CloudFormation, Terraform)
• Can integrate with third-party systems via APIs (such as GitHub, Slack, Datadog, and Jira)
• Has a broad understanding of security fundamentals
• Follows collaborative DevOps practices
• Recognizes the power of automated constraints
• Is both adept at identifying problems and solving them

This DevOps Engineer position is a remote-first individual contributor role, reporting to George Guja.

Our company is actively working towards full pay transparency. You’ll learn about the salary for this role in our first conversation. As a full-time employee, you are eligible for equity and benefits from Day 1.

We are committed to creating an inclusive team and culture built on a foundation of respect for all individuals. We strongly encourage individuals from non-traditional backgrounds or historically marginalized and underrepresented groups to apply.

• Build tools, design, and standardize processes for the Casper Engineering team that enable the migration of our legacy application to modern architecture and breaking apps into smaller functions and services.
• Identify and implement changes to meet modern best practices and optimize performance, scalability, and security.
• Assist teams in migrating from manually configured and deployed systems to a full continuous delivery (CD) approach using Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Transform our existing CI/CD tooling (such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, and SemaphoreCI) into a set of standardized, secure pipelines.
• Explore the backend systems behind our Admission platform to understand the logic and operational aspects, critically evaluate performance, identify and address bottlenecks, and identify opportunities to develop self-serve tools (such as one-click scaling operations) for developers.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and security best practices throughout the development process.
• Enable operational excellence by building self-service monitoring tools and writing incident response playbooks.
• Write and maintain documentation that describes the architecture, infrastructure, and security-related deployment processes for our Admission Assessment apps.

• Several years of hands-on experience in software, DevOps, or Platform engineering-related roles within cloud ecosystems.
• Worked on a mature product or large legacy app and as part of agile teams.
• Developed and maintained infrastructure-as-code for different tech stacks and deployment environments (such as AWS, Heroku, MongoDB, Lambda, and EC2).
• Experience in a tech company involving cross-team collaboration to integrate systems across various tech stacks and product lines.
• Contributed to an infrastructure or software development strategy, project, or initiative that took more than a year to complete.
• Proficiency in shell scripting.
• Utilized software engineering best practices, such as test-driven development, code reviews, and continuous integration and deployment.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and alerting tools (such as Datadog and CloudWatch) and incident response processes.
• Configured and provisioned management tools (such as Ansible or CloudFormation)
• The ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to individuals with varying levels of technical expertise.
• Enthusiasm for optimizing the developer experience, streamlining processes within and across teams, and improving developer productivity and velocity through automation of manual processes.

• Caring toward people. You show up, take time to listen and understand, encourage and support, and don’t shy away from providing feedback, mentoring and teaching others to help them grow.
• Curious by nature and open to possibilities. You like exploring, asking questions, listening, experimenting, and learning.
• Driven to problem-solve independently and with collaborators, seek to continuously improve your skills, methods, and practices.
• Adaptable with a preference for startup-like work environments where you can explore ways to contribute and create value, initiate and take ownership of your projects, and positively influence change.
• At your best when you can manage your work, time, and priorities independently and ask for help when you get stuck or seek feedback.
• Self-aware, with an understanding of your strengths and where you have growth opportunities.
• Motivated by meaningful work and the chance to contribute to creating a world powered by everyone’s full potential.

To ensure an equitable and inclusive process, all candidates will receive equal consideration for an interview, whether applying, introduced as a referral or contacting the manager or recruiter directly.

We look at every resume. Your application is evaluated based on the human attributes and professional skills, experiences & impact communicated in your application.

We do not offer sponsorship if you apply from abroad. You must reside in Canada and be eligible to work here to be considered for an interview.

Our interview process is designed to be a two-way discovery and create space for meaningful conversations. We want to learn who you are as a human & professional, understand your experiences, assess your skills, and ensure alignment with our mission, values and business needs.

We encourage you to be curious and ask insightful questions throughout our conversations.

Here are the steps you can expect:

• Review & Selection. A human, not an AI, reviews your resume and assesses your experience and application responses against our hiring criteria.
• Intro Conversation with Recruiter. If selected, we'll have a 45-60 minute phone call to discuss your background, interests, and provide information about the role, team, company, and compensation.
• Meet The Manager. Have a 60-minute video call with George, your potential future manager, to discuss relevant experiences and learn about the team and their day-to-day.
• Meet The Functional Leader. Engage in a 60-minute video call with Tracy Wilkinson, the Director of Software Engineering, to learn about the engineering organization and discuss your potential contributions to the long-term Engineering strategy.
• Complete a Take-Home Assignment. Deliver a small project that showcases your technical expertise.
• Meet & Present to the Team. Connect with future peers and collaborators in a 2.5-3 hour video call to share your project, learn more about the team, role and life at Acuity Insights.
• Wait For a Decision. The Hiring Manager consolidates and evaluates feedback from the interviewers to make a hiring decision within 2-4 days.
• Receive an Offer / Reference Check. If you're a good fit for the role, team, and company, we'll invite you to an offer conversation. The offer is contingent upon the completion of a reference check.

• Fair Compensation. We offer salaries based on internal pay equity, market considerations, and responsible & sustainable financial practices.
• Investment In Your Growth. Access an annual budget of $3,000 for your professional and personal development.
• Remote Work & Flexible Hours. Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere within Canada and the autonomy to set your own schedule.
• Self-Directed Vacation. Take charge of your vacation schedule and duration with unrestricted paid vacation days, supported and encouraged by your manager.
• Collective Time Off. Join the team in disconnecting from work for two weeks at the end of the year and enjoy extra Fridays off throughout the year.
• Other Paid Time Off. Take comfort in knowing you won’t feel a financial impact when you need time off due to a medical or family emergency, lose a loved one, or just need a day to nurture your mental health and well-being.
• Parental Leave. Bond with your new addition, whether you are a birthing parent, non-birthing parent, or expanding your family through surrogacy or adoption.
• Company Ownership. Get a piece of future profits with employee stock options granted on your start date.
• GRSP Matching Program. Save for your future with our Group Registered Savings Plan in partnership with Wealthsimple. We match contributions up to 2% of your salary.
• Comprehensive Health Coverage. Enroll yourself and your dependents in our health, dental, and life benefits plan through Equitable Life of Canada, starting from day one.
• Holistic Wellness Support. Receive personalized support for your physical, mental, social and financial well-being needs through our membership with Cyno.

Acuity Insights is a Canadian product and research company established in 2014. We were founded on 15 years of research by co-founders Kelly Dore (Ph.D.) and Harold Reiter (M.D MEd), who invented our first product, Casper, a higher education admissions assessment, at McMaster University in Ontario.

In 2021, we partnered with a private equity firm. It enabled us to acquire One45, a healthcare education software company, expanding our team and offerings beyond Admission Assessments (Casper & Duet) to Program Management and Insights (One45 & Analytics) for higher education institutions.

Behind Acuity Insights, you'll find a diverse team of 120+ caring, curious, and driven individuals collaborating remotely across Canada and some international locations.

We are committed to creating a supportive & collaborative culture built on respect for all individuals. We prioritize transparency, equity, and inclusion in our programs, policies and business operations.

Diversity and inclusion fuels innovation, builds better products, and contributes to healthier business outcomes. It’s our company's strength and priority. We encourage individuals from non-traditional backgrounds or historically marginalized and underrepresented groups to apply and join us in helping higher education institutions implement and practice holistic and fair admission processes.

Thank you for considering Acuity Insights as your next workplace!

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