DevOps Engineer

Title: DevOps Engineer
Location: Remote (US) / Chandler, AZ
Reports to: VP of Engineering
Employment Type: Exempt / Full-Time

About StrongMind:

StrongMind is a remote-first education and technology company on a mission to transform learning for students, families, and educators across the country. For more than 25 years, we’ve partnered with schools and districts to deliver innovative, student-centered learning experiences powered by technology, compassion, and bold thinking.

We believe education should be flexible, human, and built for real life. That belief shapes how we design our products, support our partners, and work together as a team. At StrongMind, you’ll find smart people doing meaningful work, a culture rooted in trust and accountability, and leaders who genuinely care about both outcomes and people.

The Team You Will Join

You’ll be part of the Engineering team, working closely with software engineers, product teams, and leadership. This team is responsible for building and maintaining scalable, reliable systems that power StrongMind’s learning platform. The team culture is collaborative, high-impact, and innovation-driven, with opportunities to influence infrastructure strategy, improve developer experience, and shape the future of platform engineering at StrongMind.

The Difference You Will Make

In this role, your work will directly impact platform reliability, scalability, and engineering velocity. You’ll take ownership of StrongMind’s AWS environment, improving uptime, strengthening observability, and streamlining CI/CD processes. You’ll play a key role in modernizing infrastructure, supporting cloud migration efforts, and establishing best practices that elevate operational excellence across the organization. As the platform evolves, you’ll also help lay the foundation for and eventually lead a DevOps or Platform Engineering function.

A Typical Day Looks Like

While no two days are exactly the same, you can expect to:

• Own and improve AWS infrastructure, including ECS clusters, networking, and service reliability.
• Build and enhance observability through logging, tracing, alerting, and dashboards.
• Develop and standardize CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions across multiple codebases.
• Support migration efforts from Azure to AWS, including containerization and database transitions.
• Optimize Docker images and container standards for Ruby on Rails and .NET applications.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve deployment strategies and developer experience.
• Create documentation such as runbooks and architecture decision records (ADRs).

This role balances deep technical execution with strategic ownership and is well-suited for someone who enjoys building, improving, and leading infrastructure in a fast-paced, evolving environment.

Your Expertise Includes

We’re looking for someone who brings:

• 8+ years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering.
• Deep, hands-on experience with AWS services including ECS Fargate, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, Lambda, SQS/SNS, API Gateway, CloudWatch, IAM, VPC networking, and S3.
• Strong Infrastructure-as-Code experience (Pulumi preferred, or similar tools like Terraform).
• Experience building and maintaining Docker containers for Ruby on Rails and/or .NET applications.
• CI/CD expertise using GitHub Actions across polyglot environments (Ruby, .NET, Python, Node.js/TypeScript).
• Proven ability to improve observability, uptime, and operational maturity in production systems.
• Experience managing relational databases, including performance tuning and backup strategies.
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, including DNS, load balancing, and secure architecture.
• Ability to operate independently with high ownership in a remote environment.

Bonus points if you also have:

• Experience migrating workloads from Azure to AWS.
• Familiarity with Azure services such as App Service, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, or Service Bus.
• Experience with event-driven architectures (EventBridge, SQS/SNS, Kinesis).
• Exposure to EdTech platforms or integration standards (e.g., LTI, OneRoster).
• Experience with data pipeline tools (e.g., AWS Glue, Step Functions).
• FinOps experience, including cost optimization and resource planning.
• Experience building or leading a DevOps or Platform Engineering team.

Our Commitment to Inclusion & Belonging:

We believe the best ideas come from bringing together people with different perspectives, experiences, and ways of thinking. We are committed to welcoming a broad range of talent and encouraging all qualified individuals to apply. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging and is empowered to contribute, grow, and do meaningful work.

How We'll Take Care of You:

We believe that when people feel supported, they do their best work.

Our commitment to you includes:

• A competitive total compensation package, including medical, dental, vision, and voluntary benefits

• Well-being that works for real life—from an on-site gym, virtual wellness programs, and wellness coaching to flexible work options for select roles, because your well-being fuels your brilliance
• Unlimited PTO for salaried roles and “life happens” days when you need flexibility
• A fully paid holiday week off at Christmas, so you can truly rest, reset, and reconnect
• Recognition and rewards that celebrate birthdays, meaningful anniversary milestones, and community service hours that let you give back
• Quarterly Town Halls that keep communication transparent, honest, and human
• Annual social events and traditions we genuinely look forward to—like Halloween celebrations, Wellness Fairs, and other moments that bring our community together

We’re intentional about building a workplace where people feel valued, connected, and empowered to thrive—at work and beyond.

Additional Info:

We welcome all qualified candidates eligible to work in the United States. At this time, we are unable to sponsor visas.

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and provide consideration to all applicants regardless of race, religion, color, sex, gender, national origin, age, veteran status, marital status, or disability protected by law.