DevOps Engineer Job Description

Owned by Erica Kigotho
Last updated: Mar 05, 2024 by Grace Potma
3 min read

OpenMRS is looking for someone to help us maintain, upgrade, and improve our growing infrastructure. If you’re passionate about anticipating and engineering infrastructure for developer needs and preparing for scale, you’re looking in the right place. 

  • Seeking: DevOps Engineer

  • Length: 6 months with opportunity to extend, part time.

  • Location: Remote (Global)

  • Technologies in OpenMRS community: Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, OpenStack, Docker, nginx, the Atlassian suite (Bamboo, Confluence, Jira), Discourse, Wordpress, OAuth2, LDAP, MySQL, and MongoDB. (More details about our infrastructure here.)

Role Overview

  • Maintain and continuously improve community infrastructure, with a goal of 99% uptime:

    • Maintain critical tools the community relies on (and their related servers) such as Discourse, Atlassian suite: Confluence, Jira, Bamboo (without this we can’t release software); openmrs.org; shortlink service; demo, qa, & dev environments; and, JetStream server uptime.

    • Ensure successful maintenance of all OpenMRS login services such as our LDAP Server.

    • Respond to and troubleshoot downtimes of community infrastructure assets.

  • Responsible for proactively leveraging tools to make managing our infrastructure as easy as possible.

  • Automate as much as possible within our infrastructure for a seamless user experience and availability for our community members.

  • Regularly document and share knowledge with the Global Support Team for sustainment of activities.

  • Maintain and expand infrastructure documentation on the OpenMRS Wiki, and in the Global Support Team documentation (where confidentiality is necessary).

  • Provide general guidance to the platform team that is much better placed to understand the issues involved in installing OpenMRS, but may not have deep familiarity with, e.g. Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes, or other devops tooling makes sense.

  • Strong awareness and application of best practices for preventing security issues, especially as it relates to keeping our infrastructure secure.

  • Set up Google Analytics for Director of Product and of Community to monitor traffic across community sites (website, wiki, and product demo); and work with the Global Support Team to disseminate as part of OpenMRS impact metrics.

Requirements

  • 2+ years experience as a DevOps engineer, or other relevant role (e.g. infrastructure support role, backend engineer with examples of devops work, etc).

  • Ansible experience with some knowledge of Puppet (as configuration tools for infrastructure maintenance) or similar technologies.

  • Terraform experience, especially in an OpenStack context (for setting up new servers) or similar technologies.

  • Experience hosting, maintaining, and securing web-based applications, such as Discourse, Wordpress, etc.

  • Docker or other containerized expertise.

  • LDAP, OAuth2, or equivalent technology experience (for authentication maintenance and improvements).

  • Demonstrable knowledge of scripting languages commonly used for infrastructure maintenance such as Bash, Python or Ruby.

  • Flexibility to accommodate working with collaborators in various international time zones

  • Excellent communication skills. We’re a distributed team, so frequent and clear written communication is a must. 

  • Proven ability to quickly learn and apply new technologies and methods to keep OpenMRS at the forefront of open source communities of practice.

  • Access to high-speed internet for team and community real-time calls (e.g. via Zoom, Slack Huddle, etc).

  • Proficiency in the English language, both written and verbal. 

Desired Skills and Attributes

  • Experience with the Atlassian suite, especially Jira Cloud, Confluence Cloud, and Bamboo.

  • Working knowledge of AWS or other cloud hosting providers

  • Some familiarity with Google Analytics or other web metrics tooling

  • Past experience working with, coaching, and learning from folks from very diverse cultures. 

  • Experience working with global teams.

  • Bachelor’s or higher degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Informatics, Information Science, Public Health, or a related field.

  • Self-driven work ethic & problem-solver. Self-starter who loves taking initiative and seeing things through to completion. Love for coding and solving problems.

Travel Expectations

This role is not expected to travel internationally, but may have opportunities to travel up to 10% of the time with expenses funded/reimbursed by OpenMRS Inc., and supported by the OpenMRS Inc. Operations team.

Compensation

Rates commensurate with experience and location the person is based. Location is determined by the country where the person is residing at the start of the contract.

How to Apply

Submit a cover letter and resume that addresses the responsibilities and skills outlined in the job descriptions to community@openmrs.org and cc Program Officer Erica Kigotho at erica@openmrs.org no later than March 15, 2024. Only short-listed candidates will be contacted.

Ideal starting date: April 1, 2024 or sooner if available.

For more information on OpenMRS, please see our website: openmrs.org