DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer (Mid-Level)

Team: Maintenance & DevOps 

Level: Mid Level I (Notch8 engineering ladder), with a growth path to Senior

 Location: Remote (US East Coast preferred; distributed across three US time zones) 

Employment: Full-time 

Reports to: Molly Steinwachs (COO); works day-to-day under Max Kadel (Sr. DevOps), who leads the platform; with review and support from our fractional Principal DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer 

Compensation: $75,000 - $90,000 (Mid Level I band)

About Notch8

Notch8 is a family-owned software company and Samvera Partner since 2016. We build and host open-source digital repository and digital collections platforms for academic libraries, consortia, research institutions, and cultural-heritage organizations. We run Hyku, Manifold, InvenioRDM, Dataverse, and supporting applications for customers including PALNI/PALCI, the University of Tennessee, Princeton University, Harvard, Yale, and many other leading institutions. We are building for the long term, with the company on a path toward employee ownership, and we hire people who want to do durable work on the systems institutions depend on.

The role

We host a multi-tenant platform on AWS, and we are looking for a mid-level engineer who can own day-to-day operations and improve the platform while continuing to grow toward senior infrastructure work. You will work under our senior platform lead, take real ownership of platform operations, and have principal-grade review available on the higher-risk work. This is a role for someone with solid production experience who wants to go deeper on a multi-tenant AWS and Kubernetes platform, alongside people who do this well.

What you will do

• Own routine and moderate-complexity platform changes through our GitOps workflow, with senior review on the higher-risk ones.

• Keep monitoring and alerting healthy: triage, investigate, tune, and escalate with good context.

• Drive the hands-on side of our cost-reduction work: right-sizing, finding idle and orphaned resources, cleanup and tagging, and help shape where the savings come from.

• Operate and evidence our SOC 2 controls: run recurring control checks, keep compliance tooling current, and produce the evidence behind the program.

• Manage environments: backups and restore tests, maintenance windows, and routine reliability work.

• Write and improve runbooks so the team moves faster.

• Take a full share of the on-call rotation, with a senior available to escalate to.

Our stack

You will work across this stack. We do not expect prior experience with every piece, and we will fill the gaps:

• AWS (EKS, EC2, EFS, S3, RDS, networking).

• Kubernetes, Helm, and ArgoCD for GitOps-based deployment.

• OpenTofu for infrastructure-as-code.

• PostgreSQL via Kubernetes operators, with Redis and Solr as supporting services.

• Prometheus and Grafana for metrics and monitoring.

• 1Password for secrets, Cloudflare and nginx-ingress at the edge.

• Ruby on Rails applications running on the platform.

What we are looking for

• Roughly three to five years of hands-on experience operating production systems.

• Strong fundamentals in Linux, networking, and the command line.

• Production experience with Kubernetes and at least one major cloud provider, AWS preferred.

• Comfort implementing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and managing multiple environments.

• Infrastructure-as-code experience (OpenTofu, Terraform, or similar).

• Scripting ability in at least one language (Bash, Python, or Ruby), and fluency with Git.

• Care and good judgment. We run other institutions' production systems, and we work carefully because of it.

• Clear written communication, which matters on a fully distributed team.

• Must be a U.S. Citizen to apply

Nice to have

• Experience toward the senior end of the range, or a track record of growing quickly into more ownership.

• Exposure to SOC 2 or another compliance framework (ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP).

• Karpenter, Spot orchestration, or EKS cost optimization.

• PostgreSQL operated via Kubernetes operators (Zalando, CrunchyData, or comparable).

• Ruby on Rails or another web application stack.

• AWS, CKA, or CKAD certifications. Helpful, not required.

Growth path

This role sits at Mid Level I on the Notch8 engineering ladder, with a clear path toward Senior. You will have a senior lead directing the work, principal-grade review on the hard problems, and real ownership from the start. This platform gives you a lot to grow into.

How we work

We are a small, fully-distributed team across three US time zones. The work is collaborative; we use pull-request review as the day-to-day quality mechanism and pair often. You will never be the only person responsible for a production system, and you will always have someone senior to learn from.