Hicks

DevOps Engineer
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
IrvingTexas Contract Sep 21, 2026
DevOps Engineer (AWS)
Chicago or Irving | Hybrid – 3 Days Onsite | 12 Months
Job Details
  • Estimated Start Date: 5 October 2026
  • Building Location: Chicago office or Irving Office
  • Remote Possibility: Remote-Hybrid
  • Additional Comments: 3 days in office
  • Daily Schedule: Monday thru Friday; 1st shift
Position’s Contributions to Work Group
  • In this role, you will lead our containerization strategy, build enterprise-grade automation workflows utilizing GitHub Actions, and manage our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) lifecycle to ensure high availability, optimal performance, and cost efficiency.
Typical Day or Week in the Role
Typical Task Breakdown
CI/CD & GitHub Actions Automation
  • Workflow Architecture: Design, build, and optimize matrixed, self-hosted, or cloud-hosted GitHub Actions workflows for continuous integration and automated testing.
  • Reusable Infrastructure: Build and maintain version-controlled custom GitHub Actions and reusable workflow templates to standardize pipelines across multiple engineering teams.
  • Secret Management: Manage secure environment variables, contexts, and deployment keys using GitHub Secrets, Environments, and integrations with AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault.
  • Secure Delivery: Implement OpenID Connect (OIDC) to authenticate GitHub Actions runners natively with AWS IAM, eliminating long-lived credentials.
Kubernetes & Container Orchestration
  • Cluster Management: Design, deploy, and maintain multi-cluster production AWS EKS and Kubernetes environments.
  • Upgrades & Maintenance: Execute seamless, zero-downtime cluster upgrades, patch releases, and routine maintenance node recycling.
  • Autoscaling & Cost Optimization: Configure and tune cluster autoscaling using tools like Karpenter or Cluster Autoscaler, alongside horizontal/vertical pod autoscaling (HPA/VPA).
  • Package Management: Build, maintain, and version control internal Helm charts for streamlined application delivery.
AWS Infrastructure & Automation
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Provision and manage 100% of cloud resources using Terraform or AWS CDK to maintain strict environment consistency.
  • Cloud Architecture: Administer core AWS services including EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, Route53, and RDS platforms.
  • Scripting & Tooling: Write clean, maintainable automation scripts using Python and Bash to eliminate manual interventions.
GitOps & Release Management
  • GitOps Adoption: Implement and maintain GitOps-driven deployment frameworks utilizing tools like ArgoCD or Flux to sync EKS state with source repositories.
  • Container Registry: Oversee Docker container builds, multi-stage layering, and registry vulnerability management via AWS ECR, triggered natively via GitHub Actions runner hooks.
Networking, Security, & DevSecOps
  • Cloud Networking: Manage sophisticated container networking interfaces (VPC CNI) and advanced ingress routing controllers (ALB, NGINX, or Traefik).
  • Access Control: Enforce security guardrails utilizing AWS IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) to grant fine-grained pod permissions.
Education & Experience Required
  • Degree is not required but 5+ years
Required Technical Skills
  • DevOps Experience: 5+ years of professional experience in dedicated DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or cloud infrastructure roles.
  • CI/CD Expertise: 3+ years of heavy practical experience writing, testing, and modularizing complex GitHub Actions workflows.
  • AWS Core: 5+ years of hands-on expertise architecture-focused workflows across major AWS services.
  • Kubernetes Core: 3+ years of deep technical experience specifically running production-grade workloads on Amazon EKS, including advanced troubleshooting.
  • Automation: Expert proficiency with Terraform and at least one scripting language (Python or Bash).
Preferred Qualifications
  • Certifications: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), CKAD, or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional.
  • Runner Administration: Experience managing scaling policies for enterprise-scale GitHub Actions self-hosted runners on Kubernetes (e.g., using Actions Runner Controller - ARC).