Director of DevOps

DevOps at Stellar Health is in charge of supporting an increasingly diverse infrastructure setup, and support systems built by an increasing number of engineers.

The original system was rather simplistic - a Django Application on top of Postgres, with a cron-driven ETL ingestion pipeline. While we have evolved this incrementally since to support customer growth (added Redis for caching, Celery for tasks, Elastic Search to serve certain jobs, a Postgres read replica to scale out some of the growth), due to increased customer growth we are now at the cusp of building the next generation of systems and infrastructure.

As a Director of DevOps, you will be in charge of managing a team that will be guiding the engineering team through this infrastructure evolution, and be responsible for its scalability, monitoring, and general good performance and reliability.

As we transition to more complex usage of servers, we expect your team to be able to not only be a stakeholder in informing team’s systems design, but also a partner to the engineering team when it comes to release management, CI/CD setups, build cop and on-call rotations.

Today, our systems diagram looks like this:

Over the next year our systems will change significantly - and the DevOps team will be in charge of helping us transition safely and smoothly to our next generation infrastructure.

General team management

• Create and execute on a roadmap for the DevOps organization that properly prioritizes the most important priorities for the engineering team.
• Manage a small team of DevOps individual contributors that execute on this roadmap.

Systems / infrastructure setup and deployment

• Manage application deployment infrastructure across Aptible and AWS. Our ETL’ing infrastructure, queueing, and application serving infrastructure are growing. Your team’s responsibility is to ensure that it is set up in a HIPAA compliant, scalable, and resilient way.
• Migrate, set up and own new cloud deployments on AWS in a HIPAA compliant way. Ensure that engineering is set up to deploy new services on AWS in a safe manner.
• Deploy and set up internal services (Redis, Elastic Search, Postgres) to match engineering business needs. Work together with engineering to coordinate upgrades of these systems to newer versions, scale, etc. Be responsible for the uptime of these services.
• Evolve our logging, monitoring, and alerting - and drive a best in class engineering On Call rotation that allows us to ensure high availability of our production systems.

Developer productivity tools

• Evolve our release process to make it easy for engineering to deploy and roll back releases. Help the engineering team move to a daily release cycle through speedy and automated deployments and rollbacks.
• Support the engineering organization through setting up our testing infrastructure in a way that allows for faster deployments.

• Work experience managing a compliant based infrastructure is a must. Strong experience with FedRamp could be a substitute.
• Working with Aptible, or modern AWS/GCP setups is a plus. We are a startup and the kinds of infrastructure startups have is significantly different from big companies.

Create and manage a roadmap of priorities and projects that address the most important infrastructure needs.

• Understand prioritization, level of effort, and communicate expectations over the most important initiatives of the DevOps organization in supporting the engineering team’s infrastructure.
• Drive decision making across the engineering organization around these projects and priorities, and align everybody around what we’re doing and why.

Set up well functioning infrastructure that scales in a cost effective way, and is HIPAA compliant.

• Through the next year, Stellar is maturing from a technology perspective. 
• We are rebuilding our ETL’ing infrastructure from a cron job that doesn’t scale, to a well-orchestrated, scalable infrastructure.  This data infrastructure will handle ETL’ing to multiple data sources including a new Data Warehouse.
• We are rolling out ElasticSearch to handle the load of user-facing requests. 
• We are creating new services from the existing infrastructure - a Claims Service, a Payments Service.
• Your team will be in charge of setting up the infrastructure that allows all of these services to be deployed across Aptible and AWS. You will need to work with the Engineering Leadership team and drive what services remain on Aptible, and what services should move to AWS.
• HIPAA compliance is a must in setting up anything at Stellar. It is your responsibility to ensure that any new infrastructure set up by you or engineering is done so in a HIPAA compliant manner.
• Good monitoring, logging, and alerting have to be set up for any infrastructure. Engineers that are on-call for their services should have the right tools to understand what is happening, and the tools to address the issues at hand if they are service-related, or escalate accordingly to you if they are pure infrastructure related.

Create a strong DevOps culture on the engineering team.

• Alerting, On Call rotation, good logging - are all important processes to own and lead the team in correctly setting them up, understanding them and setting good rotation practices on engineering squads.