Operations Support Engineer - Lead

OverviewBlack Canyon Consulting (BCC) is looking for a Lead Operations Support Engineer to join our DevOps and infrastructure team to support application developers and operations at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), an institute of the National Institutes of Health. This opportunity is full time at the NCBI in Bethesda, MD and/or remote.NCBI is part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NCBI advances science and public health by providing free access over the Internet to biomedical literature and genomic data, making it one of the 400 top most-visited sites in the world. NCBI has a diverse staff of smart, talented, and deeply technical people who collaborate to build critically valuable services for researchers, physicians, educators, students, and the general public. For example, NCBI develops and delivers PubMed, an index of over 29 million biomedical research abstracts; and maintains ClinicalTrials.gov, a database of over 400,000 clinical studies around the world.The Systems & DevOps team is responsible for the efficient operation of infrastructure to run NCBI's many applications. This includes providing convenient, scalable solutions for development, deployment, and operations across teams, languages, and cloud and on-prem environments.This is a great opportunity to work on challenging problems in a technical, scientific, and goal-oriented environment. NCBI offers flexible working hours, remote options, on- and off-site training courses, and conference attendance and tuition reimbursement.We attract the best people in the business with our competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, 401k plan with employer contribution, paid holidays, vacation, and tuition reimbursement. If you enjoy being a part of a high performing, professional service and technology focused organization, please apply today!Duties & ResponsibilitiesNCBI has built a modern DevOps platform based on GitLab and Kubernetes, and is looking to create a team of support engineers to assist internal developers with transitioning legacy software development and deployment to the new DevOps platform. You would be the leader of our platform operations team.Identify and resolve operational problems in a micro-service environmentWork with developers to resolve deployment and runtime problemsPerform analysis and debugging work across multiple technologiesPrioritize issues to keep applications within error budgets and meeting their SLOsProvide technical solutions to a wide range of problems and user requestsDocument process, procedures and SOPs by soliciting feedback and suggestions from team membersCompile postmortems and action items to minimize future outagesInterview other people for team member roles, and decide which ones to recommend for hire.Train new team members, and assist them with issues.Provide on-call support to NCBI's internal developers and other staff.RequirementsBS degree in STEM or equivalent experienceCustomer-focused, team-oriented dispositionGood systems debugging skillsComfortable with the Linux environment or UNIX CLIExperience with some programming or scripting languageHave experience creating processes, procedures and SOP documentation General understanding of TCP/IP, HTTP, and related protocols Initiative to take ownership of tasks and drive them to completionComfortable dealing with users with varying levels of IT knowledgeEager to learn new technologiesStrong communication and soft skills to interface with customers, peers and managementGood judgement, sense of integrity, and responsibilityPreferred Experience / SkillsetsKubernetes, OpenShift, Cloud or Linux experienceExperience with:Service Reliability Engineering in any capacityLinux systems administrationAutomated CI servers, especially TeamCity and/or GitLabAutomation programming/scripting in any of: bash, Ruby, Python, Go, Java, Scala, Rust, C++, Perl Automated configuration management, such as Puppet, Ansible, Chef, bcfg2, cfengine, etc. Puppet is preferred.Version control systems, especially gitService Mesh technologies (e.g., linkerd, Istio)Configuring or using monitoring and alerting technologies (TIGK stack, Grafana, Prometheus, OpsGenie)Confluence, Jira, and Microsoft Office suiteGitOps tools, especially ArgoCDGoogle AnthosUnderstanding of:Linux internals (system calls, file systems, processes, etc.)Linux network configurationLinux application containerization, especially DockerAttached network storage technologiesCloud computing environment such as AWS, GCP or AzureAutomated CI/CD pipelinesDistributed systems design principles

Created: 2026-04-02