DevOps Engineer

Technology Innovation Institute (TII) is a publicly funded research institute, based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. It is home to a diverse community of leading scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and researchers from across the globe, transforming problems and roadblocks into pioneering research and technology prototypes that help move society ahead.

ROLE OVERVIEW

The DevOps Engineer will design, automate, and operate secure cloud and platform capabilities supporting application and data workloads. The role covers Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, GitOps, artifact management, observability, and platform reliability across Microsoft Azure and Kubernetes environments.

Working with software, data, security, and infrastructure teams, the engineer will standardize delivery workflows, reduce operational toil and infrastructure drift, improve deployment reliability and recovery, and strengthen software supply-chain security. This hands-on individual-contributor role requires proactive ownership, structured problem-solving, and effective cross-functional collaboration.

FUNCTIONAL ACTIVITIES

Cloud Infrastructure & Automation: 

• Design, provision, and operate secure, reliable Microsoft Azure and Kubernetes platform capabilities supporting application and data workloads.
• Develop reusable Terraform modules and automated provisioning controls to increase Infrastructure as Code coverage and reduce configuration drift and manual intervention.
• Automate platform configuration, upgrades, health checks, backup validation, recovery procedures, and recurring operational tasks.
• Apply cloud governance, least-privilege access, secrets management, infrastructure-state protection, and secure network and identity patterns throughout the platform lifecycle.

CI/CD, GitOps & Artifact Management: 

• Support engineers and researchers to build and run CI/CD workflows using GitLab CI and/or Jenkins; track deployment success rate, lead time, rollback frequency, and failed-change rate.
• Implement consistent GitOps deployment, environment promotion, drift detection, and rollback practices using Argo CD and Helm.
• Administer GitLab and JFrog Artifactory with appropriate access, retention, artifact integrity, promotion, and traceability controls.
• Embed automated testing, quality gates, SBOM generation, image and dependency scanning, signing, provenance, and change controls where applicable.

Observability, Reliability & Operations: 

• Establish monitoring, alerting, and operational dashboards using Prometheus; define and monitor service-level indicators and objectives with service owners.
• Maintain centralized logging, search, and diagnostic workflows with the Elastic Stack across cloud, Kubernetes, delivery, and data workloads.
• Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvement; use operational metrics to improve recovery time and deployment success rate. Any formal on-call responsibilities will be defined separately within the operating model.

Proactive Ownership & Collaboration: 

• Proactively identify reliability, security, performance, cost, and delivery improvements; prioritize them and drive changes through to completion.
• Maintain platform standards, technical documentation, operational runbooks, reusable patterns, and knowledge-sharing material.
• Collaborate with software, data, security, architecture, and infrastructure teams; communicate progress, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs clearly.

INDUSTRY / DOMAIN

DevOps / Cloud Platform Engineering / CI/CD & Data Pipelines

Required Knowledge and Experience

• At least 5 years of experience in DevOps, cloud engineering, platform engineering, or a related field, including at least 2 years operating production cloud or Kubernetes platforms.
• Hands-on experience designing, deploying, and supporting production workloads in Microsoft Azure.
• Strong practical experience with Terraform, including reusable modules, state management, review controls, testing, environment promotion, and drift management.
• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining secure CI/CD workflows, automated testing, release controls, rollback, and environment promotion processes.
• Sound Kubernetes fundamentals, including workloads, services, configuration, secrets, access control, networking, deployments, and troubleshooting.
• Strong working knowledge of Git, branching strategies, code review, and version-controlled infrastructure and configuration.
• Proficiency in Linux administration, networking fundamentals, and production-system troubleshooting.
• Scripting and automation capability using Python, Bash or a comparable language.
• Experience monitoring and troubleshooting production services using metrics, logs, and alerts, with the ability to support incident analysis and durable corrective action.
• Demonstrated proactive ownership, structured problem-solving, clear documentation, and effective collaboration across technical teams.

Preferred and Advantageous Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience; a master’s degree is advantageous.
• Strongly preferred: experience with Argo CD and Helm for GitOps-based Kubernetes delivery, together with GitLab CI and/or Jenkins.
• Strongly preferred: experience with JFrog Artifactory, Prometheus, and the Elastic Stack in production environments.
• Advantageous: experience with AKS; Azure networking, Entra ID or workload identity, Key Vault, and private endpoints; policy as code; SBOMs, image and dependency scanning, signing, and provenance; restricted or air-gapped environments; or data platforms.

At TII, we help society to overcome its biggest hurdles through a rigorous approach to scientific discovery and inquiry, using state-of-the-art facilities and collaboration with leading international institutions. Our rigorous discovery and inquiry-based approach helps to forge new and disruptive breakthroughs in advanced materials, autonomous robotics, cryptography, digital security, directed energy, quantum computing and secure systems.