QA Platform Engineer

Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) is searching for QA Platform Engineer (DevOps) to support our work for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), an institute of the National Institutes of Health. This opportunity is full time and onsite/remote at the NCBI in Bethesda, MD and/or remote.

NCBI is part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at National Institutes of Health (NIH). NCBI advances science and public health by providing free access to biomedical literature and genomic data over the web, making it one of the 400 top most-visited sites in the world. NCBI's diverse staff of smart, talented, and deeply technical people collaborate to build critically valuable services for researchers, physicians, educators, students, and the general public.

For example, NCBI develops and delivers PubMed, an index of over 29 million biomedical research abstracts, often with links to full-text literature and supporting data.

Duties & Responsibilities

This is a great opportunity to work on challenging problems as part of NCBI's Platforms team, in a technical, scientific, and goal-oriented environment.

The Platforms team:

• Develops and continuously improves DevSecOps, DataOps, and Observability platforms.
• Develops and maintains common tools and libraries.
• Evaluates new technologies and practices.
• Helps NCBI developers with adoption platforms, tools, architectural patterns and best practices.
• Ensures compliance with the Federal application security regulations and standards by providing automated solutions and compliance pipelines.
• Practices Agile development and continuous improvement.

The Compliance and QA team within the Platform section of NCBI focuses on:

The person filling the role of QA Test Engineer will need proven software development skills using modern computing languages such as Python, JavaScript, and Java. Other highly valued expertise includes web technologies and experience with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). In addition to automating tests (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright), a person in this role would be expected to implement frameworks and utilities to support deployment, testing, and monitoring.

• Build and maintain compliance pipelines with built-in quality gates
• Continuously automatically gather metrics for application quality for the enterprise-wide portfolio of applications
• Provide QA services on a project basis

NCBI's platforms are based on containerization, Kubernetes, GitOps and open interfaces with deployments to multiple clouds and premises.

Strong coding skills in at least one programing language is required. NCBI uses Python, Javascript/Typescript, C++, some Kotlin and Scala and a bit of Golang and Rust.

NCBI is a Linux shop, candidates need adequate level of Linux command-line skills. Sysadmin-level skills are a bonus.

Familiarity with build tools and various web, RPC and other frameworks is a bonus. Experience with design patterns in coding and architecture is a bonus.

Any knowledge of the following is helpful but not required:

• OpenShift, Anthos, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Hashicorp Nomad
• Observability tools such as Prometheus, EFK (ElasticSearch, fluentd, Kibana), TIGK (Telegraph, InfluxDB, Graphana, Kapacitor), DataDog, Sensu, Jaeger, Sentry, OpsGenie, PagerDuty.
• Service mesh technologies such as Istio, Linkerd
• Kafka, Apache Pulsar, RabbitMQ, Amazon Kinesis, Apache Flume, Apache Storm, Apache Spark Streaming, Google Cloud Pub/Sub
• GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, Teamcity, Artifactory, or equivalent products for management of Git source control, CI/CD pipelines and artifact lifecycle management.
• Secret Management tools such as Hashicorp Vault, CyberArk, Azure Key Vault, Google Cloud Secret Manager or equivalent.

Positions offered at any level. Growth mindset is encouraged and the team offers leadership opportunities at any level.

Educational Requirements

• B.S. in a STEM field (Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics) or equivalent industry experience in Systems Engineering.