DevOps Engineer at SARAO - South African Radio Astronomy Observatory

Purpose:

• The DevOps Engineer automates and supports the tools and processes relating to continuous delivery, integration and deployment for software packages, platforms, operating systems and infrastructure in the Digital Signal Processing Department within the Engineering & Technology Development Division.
• The DevOps Engineer works closely with and supports the various development teams within the Digital Signal Processing Department.

Key Responsibilities:

•  Develop, maintain and support the CI/CD pipeline of the group to enable continuous delivery, integration and deployment of the group’s products and applications
•  Develop, maintain and support the logging and monitoring stacks to enable system health status monitoring to support and improve reliability and quality
•  Manage, maintain and support the Compute and Network Infrastructure within the group in terms of supporting the design of new systems, deployments, technical configuration management, and ensuring required uptime
•  Participate in software design processes, across the entire life cycle, to improve quality, maintainability and robustness of delivered products
•  Provide operational support for the operation of Digital Signal Processing Compute and Network Infrastructure and participate in after-hours, on-call support as required
•  Driving the incident management processes and continuously implementing lessons learned to improve overall quality and reliability
•  Participate in the generation of technical system and product-related documentation applicable to the CI/CD pipeline, logging and monitoring stacks and Compute and Network Infrastructure to support the delivery and hand over of the Digital Signal Processing Group’s products

Key Requirements:

Qualification:

•  B.Sc (NQF 7) Computer Science or related with 6+ years relevant experience, OR
•  B.Tech (Eng) (NQF 7) Computer, Electrical or Electronic with 6+ years relevant experience, OR
•  B.Sc (Hons) (NQF 8) Computer Science or related with 4+ years relevant experience, OR
•  B.Eng/B.Sc (Eng) (NQF 8) Computer, Electrical or Electronic with 4+ years relevant experience; OR
•  MSc / M.Eng (NQF 9) Computer Science or relevant Engineering field with 3+ years relevant experience

Experience:

•  Experience as a DevOps / System Administrator OR as a Software Developer coupled with further education or training in DevOps and System Administration
•  Experience working in a high-performance computing environment is preferable
•  Configuration and management of CI/CD pipelines to support development and delivery of software products
•  Configuration and management of logging and monitoring stacks and frameworks for system health monitoring
•  Linux system installation, configuration and administration
•  Software development and scripting using the Python Programming Language
•  Deployment, upgrade and maintenance of Compute and Network Infrastructure
•  Working with workflow and issue management tools (e.g., JIRA)
•  Working with source code and version control tools (e.g., Git)
•  Being responsible for mission-critical pipelines and infrastructure

Knowledge:

•  Containerisation (e.g., Docker, Podman, LXD, ECS)
•  Orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes, Mesos, Nomad)
•  Infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Ansible, Puppet, Chef)
•  Distributed monitoring and alerting (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic)
•  Distributed logging (e.g., ELK stack)
•  Deployment (e.g., MaaS, FAI)
•  Virtualisation (e.g., Openstack, proxmox)
•  Continuous integration (e.g., Jenkins, Buildbot, Github Actions)
•  Distributed Storage (e.g., Ceph, Lustre, MinIO)
•  Knowledge of high-performance computing infrastructure
•  Knowledge of Ethernet networks

Additional Notes:

•  Desire to continuously learn, problem solve and acquire new skills with cutting edge technology
•  A clear and methodical approach to problem solving
•  A high attention to detail, excellent organisation skills
•  Good communication skills, written and verbal
•  Ability to effectively transfer knowledge and skills to other team members
•  Eagerness to develop a technical specialisation and expertise

Closing Date: 31 August 2024