Operations Engineer / Devops
Location: Philadelphia, PA

Overview

Azavea is a Philadelphia-based civic technology firm that uses geospatial data to build software and data analytics for the web. They are looking to grow their Operations team to support new cloud computing operations capacity. Azavea both builds custom web apps and SaaS in several civic domains, including:  climate change, urban ecosystem management, public safety, watersheds, and elections.

They are looking for an Operations Engineer (devops) who enjoys the intricacies of deploying and scaling an application as much as building it. A person that is passionate about building and operating software that will have a positive impact – someone interested in public service, but not necessarily in working for a government or a non-profit organization, and someone who enjoys working in a variety of technology environments.

Azavea is a B Corporation committed to working on projects that have social and civic impact and advancing the state-of-the-art through research. Customers are local governments, non-profit organizations and academic or federal research projects. They build custom apps; perform geospatial analysis; manage several open source civic software projects (DistrictBuilder, OpenTreeMap, and others); and develop an open source, high performance computing framework, GeoTrellis, that enables them to build fast analytical applications by distributing the geospatial data processing. Developers work across the technology stack from database and application servers to modern, browser-based front-ends.

Half Azavea's colleagues are software engineers and most of the rest are fairly technical, so they don’t have a lot of traditional IT support requirements, but much of their work is increasingly based on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, and they believe that investments made in automated deployment and management processes are important to improving productivity, software quality and user experience. They recently deployed three new SaaS products (OpenTreeMap, Cicero, and HunchLab) that are based on AWS. These new products rely on auto-scaling, EC2, VPC, S3, SWF, RDS and other services and APIs. While their team is experienced with AWS, as more customers rely on these new SaaS products Azavea is interested in expanding their capacity to research, monitor, optimize, and adapt our infrastructure to changing conditions.

 

What you’ll do:

  • Work with software teams and the Director of Operations to build out and maintain IT infrastructure, particularly as it relates to Amazon Web Services.
  • Engage in multidisciplinary work that applies an agile process to system architecture, software development, testing and deployment.
  • Optimize database, server and client performance to create applications with both functional and responsive user experiences.
  • Contribute to both a growing company and to the open source communities that support their work.

You should:

  • Know your way around Linux systems.
  • Experience architecting solutions based on Amazon Web Services, Rackspace or Google Compute Engine.
  • Demonstrate experience with automated deployment, continuous integration, and source control.
  • Know how to build and support scalable web applications in a variety of languages (Python, Scala, Go).
  • Demonstrate familiarity with networking and security concepts.
  • Be interested in working with a small, collaborative team on meaningful projects.
  • Get excited about a diversity of both projects and technologies.

You get extra points for:

  • Demonstrating your open source or other community service contributions
  • Experience with core web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS) and contemporary frameworks like jQuery, Angular, Backbone, and Bootstrap.
  • A good understanding of MVC architecture and RESTful design patterns
  • Experience with configuration management tooling (Chef, Ansible, Puppet) and application containerization techniques.
  • Familiarity with web and AWS security best practices.

Office and Benefits

The Philadelphia office is located in a brightly lit office on the 4th floor of a converted factory building in the Callowhill neighborhood, a short walk from Center City, the Reading Terminal Market and SEPTA subway and regional rail stations. For bicyclists, they have in-house bike parking, a shower and lockers. It’s an open office plan with several smaller rooms for team meetings, private space and concentration time. You get a top-end Linux workstation, Mac or Windows laptop with a pile of memory for VMs and extra monitors. They have flex-time to deal with personal stuff, and most employees work a 40 – 45 hour week on a regular schedule. After the first six months, developers can also spend up to 10% of their time on a geospatial open source, professional development, or R&D project.

They offer a salary commensurate with skills and experience and a benefits package that includes:

  • Fully subsidized health care, dental, prescription plan, including for spouse/partner and children
  • Medical reimbursement plan to cover what the health insurance does not
  • Retirement plan with matching percentage
  • Almost 4 weeks paid vacation plus sick/personal time off
  • Family and medical leave
  • Flexible work schedule
  • Paid maternity and paternity leave
  • Paid time off for voting and volunteering
  • Education assistance plan
  • Student loan assistance
  • Public transit and biking reimbursement plans
  • Monthly lunches on the house
  • 10% time for Research or Training Projects
  • Profit-sharing bonus plan
  • Financial transparency through an open book policy
  • Kind, capable and thoughtful colleagues

Azavea welcomes qualified candidates from all walks of life and value diversity in our company, and prohibit discrimination based on race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, military service, disability unrelated to job requirements, marital status, or domestic partner status.

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