Devops Engineer In Edtech (Remote In Canada)

Imagine a world where educational institutions, including medical schools, engineering schools, business schools, teachers' colleges, and others, train and graduate a diverse range of students who bring professionalism, empathy, integrity, cultural competency, and additional human skills to their jobs.

That’s the world we are on a mission to build.

Acuity Insight’s Casper Engineering team builds software that enables Higher Education admission teams to see beyond book smarts and discover high-potential applicants based on their levels of social and emotional intelligence.

Here’s a chance to join the Casper Engineering team as its first dedicated DevOps Engineer.

In this role, you get to help us further adopt AWS as our cloud platform of choice. Developers on the Casper team will be your customers. You’ll support them as we scale our assessment platform beyond the 150,000+ annual applicants using it today.

It’s a chance to help automate the management of services deployed worldwide. You’ll design the internal tools, processes, and workflows to standardize the developer experience and facilitate efficient, secure, and rapid software delivery. Tasks include building deployment pipelines, securing AWS accounts, and developing monitoring tools.

You also get to partner with other DevOps-focused team members as part of our Analytics and One45 Engineering teams. You’ll work together on various projects and tech stacks and build shared infrastructure over time.

This opportunity is best suited to an engineer who:

• Has a broad understanding of security fundamentals
• Recognizes the power of automated constraints
• Follows collaborative DevOps practices
• Understands infrastructure-as-code processes and tools (such as CloudFormation)
• Has worked with cloud ecosystems (preferably AWS)
• Can integrate with third-party systems via APIs (such as GitHub, Slack, Datadog, and Jira)
• Is both adept at identifying problems and solving them

This DevOps Engineer position is a remote-first individual contributor role, reporting to George Guja.

Our company is actively working towards full pay transparency. You’ll learn about the salary for this role in our first conversation. As a full-time employee, you are eligible for equity and benefits from Day 1.

Diverse teams fuel innovation, build better products, and drive better business outcomes. We are committed to creating an inclusive culture built on a foundation of respect for all individuals. We strongly encourage individuals from non-traditional backgrounds or historically marginalized and underrepresented groups to apply.

In this role, you can expect to:

• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and security best practices throughout the development process.
• Assist teams in migrating from manually configured and deployed systems to a full continuous delivery (CD) approach using Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Identify and implement changes to meet modern best practices and optimize performance, scalability, and security.
• Explore the backend systems behind our Admission platform to understand the logic and operational aspects, critically evaluate performance, identify and address bottlenecks, and identify opportunities to develop self-serve tools (such as one-click scaling operations) for developers.
• Enable operational excellence by building self-service monitoring tools and writing incident response playbooks.
• Build tools, design, and standardize processes for the Casper Engineering team that enable the migration of our legacy application to modern architecture and breaking apps into smaller functions and services.
• Transform our existing CI/CD tooling (such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, and SemaphoreCI) into a set of standardized, secure pipelines.
• Write and maintain documentation that describes the architecture, infrastructure, and security-related deployment processes for our Admission Assessment apps.

To thrive in this role, you have:

• Utilized software engineering best practices, such as test-driven development, code reviews, and continuous integration and deployment.
• The ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to individuals with varying levels of technical expertise.
• Configured and provisioned management tools (such as Ansible or CloudFormation)
• Enthusiasm for optimizing the developer experience, streamlining processes within and across teams, and improving developer productivity and velocity through automation of manual processes.
• Contributed to an infrastructure or software development strategy, project, or initiative that took more than a year to complete.
• Experience in a tech company involving cross-team collaboration to integrate systems across various tech stacks and product lines.
• Worked on a mature product or large legacy app and as part of agile teams.
• Proficiency in shell scripting.
• Developed and maintained infrastructure-as-code for different tech stacks and deployment environments (such as AWS, Heroku, MongoDB, Lambda, and EC2).
• Hands-on experience with monitoring and alerting tools (such as Datadog and CloudWatch) and incident response processes.
• Several years of hands-on experience in software, DevOps, or Platform engineering-related roles within cloud ecosystems.

To thrive at Acuity Insights, you are:

• Self-aware, with an understanding of your strengths and areas to focus growing in.
• Driven to problem-solve, independently and with collaborators, and seek to continuously improve your skills, methods, and practices.
• Motivated by meaningful work and creating social impact.
• At your best when you have autonomy to manage your work, time, and priorities, and know when to ask for help and invite collaborators.
• Caring toward people. You show up, take time to listen and understand, encourage and support, and don’t shy away from providing feedback and mentoring and teaching others to help them grow.
• Adaptable with a preference for fluid and ambiguous work environments where you get to explore ways to make a visible impact, take ownership of your own projects, and positively influence change.
• Curious by nature and open to possibilities. You like to explore, ask questions, listen, experiment, and learn.

Selection Process

To ensure a fair and inclusive process, all candidates, whether applying directly or through a referral, will receive equal consideration for an interview. We read every application, evaluate candidates based on their skills, experiences, and alignment with our current and future business needs, as well as our mission and values.

Please note that you must reside in Canada and be eligible to work in the country to be considered for an interview.

Interview Process

Our interview process is designed to be a two-way discovery. We want to get to know you as a person, assess your functional skills, and ensure alignment with our mission and values. Feel free to ask questions throughout the process.

Here are the steps you can expect:

• Complete a Take-Home Assignment. Deliver a small project that showcases your technical expertise.
• Meet & Present to the Team. Connect with future peers and collaborators in a 2.5-3 hour video call to share your project, learn more about the team, role and life at Acuity Insights.
• Meet The Functional Leader. Engage in a 60-minute video call with Tracy Wilkinson, the Director of Software Engineering, to learn about the engineering organization and discuss your potential contributions to the long-term Engineering strategy.
• Receive an Offer / Reference Check. If you're a good fit for the role, team, and company, we'll invite you to an offer conversation. The offer is contingent upon the completion of a reference check.
• Review & Selection: A human, not an AI, reviews your resume and assesses your experience and application responses against our hiring criteria.
• Wait For a Decision. The Hiring Manager consolidates and evaluates feedback from the interviewers to make a hiring decision within 2-4 days.
• Meet The Manager. Have a 60-minute video call with George, your potential future manager, to discuss relevant experiences and learn about the team and their day-to-day.
• Intro Conversation with Recruiter. If selected, we'll have a 45-60 minute phone call to discuss your background, interests, and provide information about the role, team, company, and compensation.

Key Benefits:

• Remote Work & Flexible Hours. Enjoy the freedom to work from anywhere within Canada and autonomy over your working hours.
• Parental Leave. Bond with your new addition, whether you are a birthing parent, non-birthing parent, or expanding your family through surrogacy or adoption.
• Collective Time Off. Join the team in disconnecting from work for two weeks at the end of the year and enjoy monthly Acuity Days.
• GRSP Matching Program. Save for your future with our Group Registered Savings Plan in partnership with Wealthsimple. We match contributions up to 2% of your salary.
• Holistic Wellness Support. Receive personalized support for your physical, mental, social and financial well-being needs through our membership with Cyno.
• Investment In Your Growth. Access an annual budget of $3,000 for your professional and personal development.
• Fair Compensation. We offer salaries based on internal pay equity, ensuring fairness and contributing to a responsible and sustainable business.
• Flexible & Self-Directed Vacation. Enable work-life balance with customizable time off. Take charge of your vacation schedule and duration for more fulfilling experiences.
• Employee Stock Options. Participate in our growth with options granted on your start date and vesting at 1/4 per year.
• Comprehensive Health Coverage. Enroll yourself and your dependents in our health, dental, and life benefits plan through Equitable Life of Canada, starting from day one.
• Other Paid Time Off. Take comfort in knowing you won’t feel a financial impact when you need time off due to a medical or family emergency, lose a loved one, or just need a day to nurture your mental health and well-being.

A Bit More About Us

Acuity Insights (formerly Altus Assessments) is a Canadian product and research company established in 2014. We were founded on 15 years of research by co-founders Kelly Dore (Ph.D.) and Harold Reiter (M.D MEd), who invented our first product, Casper, a higher education admissions assessment, at McMaster University in Ontario.

In 2021, we acquired One45, a healthcare education software company, expanding our team and offerings beyond admissions assessments (Casper) to program management (One45 and Analytics) for higher education institutions.

Behind Acuity Insights, you'll find a diverse team of 130+ caring, curious, and driven individuals collaborating remotely across Canada and some international locations.

We prioritize transparency, equity, and inclusion in our policies, and day-to-day operations.

We have a clear vision and a 10-year roadmap for the future. We have well-established product-market fit, and right now our focus is to expand into new vertical markets.

Thank you for considering Acuity Insights as your next workplace!