DevOps Engineer

Washington, District of Columbia, United States

OVERVIEW: A thriving, mission-driven multimedia organization, NPR produces award-winning news, information, and music programming in partnership with hundreds of independent public radio stations across the nation. The NPR audience values information, creativity, curiosity, and social responsibility – and our employees do too. We are innovators and leaders in diverse fields, from journalism and digital media to IT and development. Every day, our employees and member stations touch the lives of millions worldwide.

Across our organization, we’re building a workplace where collaboration is essential, diverse voices are heard, and inclusion is the key to our success. We are committed to doing the right thing in our journalism and in every role s means that integrity, adherence to our ethical standards, and compliance with legal obligations are fundamental responsibilities for every employee at NPR.

NPR is seeking a Dev Ops Engineer to join our cross-discipline technical product team. In this role, you will build and maintain the products, services, and tools that power the NPR Network, serving millions of public media consumers daily.

We are looking for an adaptable, curious systems professional who has deep technical knowledge of cloud-based administration, strong scripting skills, and a passion for automation and cloud orchestration. Working closely with developers and product managers, you will ensure our systems are scalable, robust, and highly performant.

This is a union-represented role covered under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement with NABET-CWA DMU.

• Infrastructure Automation:
  Build, maintain, and optimize robust CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure deployment workflows using automated orchestration tools and scripting languages.
• System Administration:
  Administer, monitor, and troubleshoot Linux/Unix-based compute instances across on‑premises and multi‑cloud environments.
• Cloud & Platform Engineering:
  Support, deploy, and scale workloads within cloud environments, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.
• Scalability & Performance:
  Investigate, analyze, and optimize application performance and infrastructure scaling limits to support peak traffic events.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC):
  Standardize environments and maintain reproducible state models by developing clean, modular Infrastructure as Code.
• Database & Storage Management:
  Monitor, configure, and troubleshoot relational databases and storage architectures to ensure optimal data flow and integrity.
• Content Delivery & Edge Routing:
  Configure and manage Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to optimize media delivery and caching strategies.
• Documentation & Knowledge Sharing:
  Write and maintain detailed, clear system documentation and architectural diagrams to support team alignment and operational resilience.
• On‑Call & System Reliability:
  Participate in a shared engineering on‑call rotation to quickly diagnose, mitigate, and resolve production system incidents.

• 2 to 3 years of professional experience in a Dev Ops (AWS), Systems Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) role.
• Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field may be substituted for 1–2 years of experience.
• Strong hands‑on proficiency in Linux/Unix system administration.
• Hands‑on experience writing automation scripts using languages like Python, Bash, or similar administrative scripting tools.
• Practical experience utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles and cloud orchestration technologies.
• Experience with virtualization technologies and containerization.
• Basic understanding of relational database administration, storage technologies, and CDN concepts.
• Active willingness and eligibility to participate in a scheduled on‑call support rotation.

• Experience integrating, configuring, and tuning infrastructure monitoring and application performance management (APM) tools.
• Experience participating in large‑scale application migration projects from on‑premises environments to cloud platforms.
• Automation‑First Mindset:
  Ability to…