The Texas Tribune, the state’s go-to source for Texas politics and public policy news, is hiring a DevOps engineer to maintain our software infrastructure and systems, strengthen our security, grow our capabilities and improve our technical processes.

In this role, you will work full-time in our engineering department, managing infrastructure and supporting development for our core website and content management system, data explorers, membership services, platform integrations and analytics products.

You will be part of a team that is constantly improving our newsroom’s systems (including a Django CMS and its interaction with external APIs), as well as prototyping new tools. We care deeply about testing, modularity, and maintainability. This is not a journalism position, but you will work closely with journalists and contribute to building news products.

The starting annual salary for this position is $90,000+, depending on qualifications.

Responsibilities:

• Design, maintain, and provision infrastructure systems using industry best practices (Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Heroku)
• Administer our databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL), manage data backup and restore systems
• Automate our tests and improve our continuous integration and delivery systems (CI/CD)
• Configure logging, monitoring and alerting systems
• Research and educate the engineering team on emerging technologies and tools
• Collaborate on transitioning our infrastructure to Kubernetes and serverless technologies using infrastructure-as-code practices (Terraform)

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree and at least 2 years of relevant work experience or equivalent, which can include internships/fellowships and open source projects
• Experience in using cloud providers like Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services
• Experience or familiarity deploying containerized applications in a production cloud environment
• Software development skills or experience any one of the following: Python, Ruby, Java, C++, C#, NodeJS or Go
• Understanding of git and code collaboration best practices
• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills

It would be nice if you have experience with:

• Web security threat models and prevention tactics
• Maintaining infrastructure-as-code (Ansible, Terraform)
• Serverless technologies (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Run, GitHub Actions, Cloudflare Workers, etc.)
• Email delivery and security standards
• Monitoring, reporting and dashboard systems

We know there are great candidates who won’t check all of the boxes above, and we also know you might bring important skills that we haven’t considered. If that’s you, don’t hesitate to apply and tell us about yourself.

What you can expect from us:

• Opportunity to work with modern tooling and experiment with new ways to solve old problems. We’re a nimble team and always eager to try new approaches that improve developer experience and site reliability.
• Relevant, high-impact projects. You’ll work on infrastructure that supports reporting on elections, lawmakers in power, schools and much more. We see the impact of our journalism all over Texas and sometimes beyond.
• Encouragement of professional enrichment with hours and budget set aside for exploratory learning and skill development.
• An emphasis on an inclusive and equitable team culture, work-life balance, and ensuring you have purpose and direction in your career.

Still have questions? Drop us a line at [email protected].

About The Texas Tribune

Here’s what you should know about the Tribune. From day one we’ve had disruption, innovation and risk-taking in our DNA. We’re ambitious as all get out but still have the punch-above-your-weight mentality of a scrappy start-up. We believe we can meet the demands of our audience and our own expectations for excellence without breaking the bank — or our staff. We understand not everything is a story for us — we have to make choices — but we’re always looking to expand our boundaries. We’re nonprofit because the challenging economic reality for media these days obligates us to find a different way, reliable and sustainable, to fund serious journalism. We’re nonpartisan because we live in the United States of Confirmation Bias — and we don’t need to be part of the problem. We don’t need to be yet another source of information affirming the voices and perspectives that are already in people’s heads. At the same time, nonpartisan is not non-thinking. We call B.S. when B.S. needs to be called.

All of us at the Tribune believe the best way to achieve that mission is to resemble the state we cover. We’re committed to building an inclusive office for people of all backgrounds and ages, and we’re taking steps to meet that commitment. We especially encourage members of traditionally underrepresented communities to apply for this role, including women, people of color, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

Location

The Texas Tribune office is located in downtown Austin, steps away from the Texas Capitol. This position is based in Austin, but we will consider candidates who are based elsewhere in the United States and can travel occasionally to our Austin office. We have colleagues in the organization that come into the office on a regular basis and colleagues based in various cities throughout the United States.

Benefits

This job is full time and has the following benefits:

• Comprehensive and inexpensive medical, vision and dental insurance
• A $50-a-month cellphone stipend
• 20 days of paid time off annually
• 12 paid holidays
• Up to 16 weeks of paid family leave plus four weeks of additional job protection
• Annual 401(k) match of $2,000
• A $2,000-a-year stipend for professional training and career development