Sr DevOps Engineer Specialist - 90405117 - Remote (Washington, DC, US, 20001)

Your success is a train ride away!

As we move America’s workforce toward the future, Amtrak connects businesses and communities across the country. We employ more than 20,000 diverse, energetic professionals in a variety of career fields throughout the United States. The safety of our passengers, our employees, the public and our operating environment is our priority, and the success of our railroad is due to our employees.

Are you ready to join our team?

Our values of ‘Do the Right Thing, Excel Together and Put Customers First’ are at the heart of what matters most to us, and our Core Capabilities, ‘Building Trust, Accountability, Effective Communication, Customer Focus, and Proactive Safety & Security’ are what every employee needs to know and do to be most impactful at Amtrak. By living the Amtrak values, focusing on our capabilities, and actively embracing and fostering diverse ideas, backgrounds, and perspectives, together we will honor our past and make Amtrak a company of the future.

Job Summary

Work Environment: Remote

The Sr DevOps Engineer Specialist supports the reliability, availability, and performance of Amtrak's digital systems. This role is responsible for building monitoring systems, automating deployments, participating in incident response, and working alongside development teams to ensure production readiness. The engineer will help implement best practices around infrastructure-as-code, observability, and secure deployments while contributing to documentation and service maturity.

Essential Functions

• CI/CD & Release · Build reliable pipelines with caching/parallelism and gated deploys with modern DevSecOps principles · Implement provenance basics (SBOM, artifact signatures where available). · Define rollback steps and pre-prod checks with service owners.
• Platform (IaC, Cloud, Containers) · Compose reusable Terraform/CFN/CDK modules; add validations/linters. · Operate k8s/ECS workloads (probes, HPA, config/secrets management). · Manage image lifecycle (base images, tagging, retention).
• Observability, SLOs & Incidents · Create actionable dashboards/alerts; reduce noisy alerts. · Define SLIs with teams; document runbooks tied to alerts. · Lead smaller incidents; drive follow-ups to completion.
• Security & Compliance · Integrate SAST/DAST/dependency & container scans into CI/CD. · Centralize secrets and rotate them; enforce least privilege in IAM. · Capture deployment evidence for audits.
• Automation & Tooling · Build resilient automation (idempotency, retries, error handling). · Package scripts as reusable CLIs/modules; add unit tests. · Expose useful automations via simple APIs or jobs.
• Platform DX, Docs & Collaboration · Publish “golden” templates/examples that reduce onboarding friction. · Mentor juniors; facilitate focused design/ops reviews. · Keep service and platform docs current and searchable.
• Networking, Data Resilience & FinOps · Configure L7 routing and cert management; basic WAF/CDN usage. · Implement and verify backups/restores; document RPO/RTO basics. · Track build/infra costs; right-size environments.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field — or equivalent hands-on experience.
• 5+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or infrastructure support roles.
• Work Environment: Remote

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with containerized workloads (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS).
• Exposure to security tools or compliance requirements.
• Certifications in AWS, Terraform, or Kubernetes a plus.
• Experience using log aggregation tools (e.g., ELK Stack, FluentBit, Loki).
• Knowledge of DORA metrics, reliability KPIs, and engineering effectiveness measurement frameworks.
• Background in regulated environments (e.g., PCI, HIPAA, FedRAMP) with experience implementing security automation at scale.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Experience with one or more cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
• Understands core cloud services (e.g., S3, EFS, Kinesis) and basic troubleshooting techniques
• Proficiency with Linux-based systems and shell scripting.
• Familiarity with IaC (e.g., CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible) and version control (Git).
• Basic understanding of monitoring and alerting systems.
• Willingness to participate in incident response and service ownership.
• Strong desire to learn and grow in automation, observability, and SRE practices.

Environmental Conditions/Physical Demands

The salary/hourly range is $86,500.00 – $111,996.00. Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, etc. Depending on an employee’s assigned worksite or location, Amtrak may consider a geo-pay differential to be applied to the employee’s base salary. Amtrak may offer additional incentive and pay programs to recognize and reward our employees, including a short-term incentive bonus based upon factors such as individual and company