Devops Engineering Consultant- Remote

Resolve to Save Lives
Posted 2 years ago
Devops Engineering Consultant

Resolve to Save Lives is a global health organization that aims to save millions of lives by reducing preventable deaths from cardiovascular disease and to prevent infectious disease epidemics. Since September 2017, Resolve to Save Lives has worked closely with low- and middle-income country governments, the World Health Organization, academic and other civil society partners to build capacity for and implement a core package of interventions to reduce cardiovascular disease, the world’s leading cause of death. To learn more about our work, visit: Home | Resolve to Save Lives

Job summary
We’re looking for a Devops Consultant to help us accomplish our goal of partnering with countries to save 100 million lives in 30 years. Our team provides software to support public health programs that aim to prevent cardiovascular disease. Read more about our work at Resolve Cardiovascular Health. This is a short-term contract position for a period of six months.

Our team developed Simple (simple.org), a free, open source app used by healthcare workers to better manage patients with high blood pressure and diabetes. By allowing doctors to track patient care over time, we can help them control blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Today, Simple is used by thousands of nurses and doctors every day, treating almost 2 million patients across India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Sri Lanka, with all data owned exclusively by the countries themselves.

Running Simple in 4 countries comes with its set of challenges. Deployment environments and configurations differ from country to country. In addition, some of our partners would like to migrate their deployment of Simple away from cloud-based services and into government-owned data centers. By joining our team, you will play a pivotal role in several ways.
  • Our short term goal of migrating existing Simple deployments to new hosting environments.
  • Our long term goal of building a sustainable deployment pipeline that allows us to deploy Simple to new countries quickly and reliably, adapting to the country’s needs and constraints.
Achieving these goals ensures that we can continue to support almost 2 million (and growing!) patients with their hypertension treatment. We also unlock the ability to easily say yes to launching Simple in more countries.

Our team prides itself on:
  • Delivering fast, simple software used by healthcare workers in clinics every day
  • Working on solutions for tens of millions of patients
  • Building holistic products
  • Contributing to an open source project used in multiple countries
  • Open, honest, and supportive collaboration with the rest of the Simple product team
  • Shipping and iterating instead of chasing perfection
  • Ensuring patient privacy and data security

Our approach
Simple consists of a Ruby on Rails server that provides a web dashboard for public health workers as well as a sync API for the offline-first Simple mobile app.
The web dashboard provides aggregated reports at the regional and clinic levels, allowing public health officers to see what’s working and address program issues in the field. Our reports are used to help return patients to care, ensure drugs are in stock, and assist hospital administrators in staffing and training needs.
Here are some example projects that give you some idea of what’s in store:
  • Improving how our app is deployed in AWS, on-premise servers in government data centers, and in other third-party cloud services
  • Automating and simplifying our infrastructure setup process across our various deployments
  • Dockerizing our infrastructure so we can deploy in varied environments
  • Migrate existing deployments of Simple to government-owned hosting environments
  • Revamp our monitoring and alerting strategy to more effectively keep an eye on the health of Simple deployments across several countries.
Mindset
We try hard to be a team full of empathy, inclusion, and respect. We trust each other, have hard conversations with open mindedness, and assume positive intent. We are a small team of self-directed people. Once familiar with the project, we expect engineers to be able to take ownership and guide large projects from start to finish. We write down ideas and work as asynchronously as possible, meeting via video conference when necessary. Proposing ideas and trying things matter more than always being right. We are frequently wrong and try to write code we can easily change when we learn new things. We’re excited for you to participate and look forward to helping you grow your own skills as well.
Diversity
Given that we’re writing software for the globe, it’s critical that our team represent the diverse environments in which we operate. We strive for an inclusive, diverse team with different perspectives, ideas, and identities.

About you
We are seeking an experienced candidate who is ready to do work that matters. The ideal candidate embraces learning about our challenges, has solved common infrastructure and devops challenges (especially at scale), and can work effectively with our entirely remote team.
Here’s what makes a successful engineer at Resolve:
  • Value simplicity over perfection
  • Be a problem solver and doer, take ownership of your work
  • Focus on outcomes instead of getting lost in details
  • Clear communications that empower and enable others
  • Ask for help when you need it
  • Coach, share knowledge, and nurture a supportive engineering culture
  • Don’t be afraid to try things and learn from mistakes
  • Set clear timelines and document progress
We’re keen to find someone for whom our problems look familiar. Critically, we also want someone who is curious, writes and communicates well, can thrive while working asynchronously across many time zones, anticipates user needs from a human level, and always looks to keep things simple and iterate. We’re looking for someone who can self-manage, plans their time wisely, and delivers straightforward solutions to vague problems.

Required qualifications
  • Technical experience:
    • Hands-on architectural experience with modern cloud infrastructure and managing apps that are growing quickly
    • Automating infrastructure setup and deployment workflows
    • Experience deploying Rails apps with
      • Passenger, nginx
      • Postgres db with hot standbys and periodic data backups
      • Redis cluster with backups
      • Load Balancing
    • Experience with modern devops tools such as
      • Docker
      • Ansible
      • Chef
      • Capistrano
Location: This is a remote position. To ensure smooth collaboration with the team and responsiveness to our partners, we’re currently looking for engineers in India, Africa, or Europe.