Senior DevOps Engineer
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Summary
Senior DevOps Engineer with an SRE focus at HCSS, a construction software company. Day to day: managing and optimizing Azure SQL Elastic Pools, building observability with Grafana, automating infrastructure with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines, and leading high availability, disaster recovery, and incident response across Azure/AWS cloud environments.
We are HCSS. For the last 40 years, we have been developing software to help construction companies streamline their operations. Based in Sugar Land, TX, our mission is helping customers achieve excellence through our proven customer-centric, end-to-end solutions and exceptionally helpful service, while providing a great life for our employees. With this mission at the core of everything we do, HCSS is a pioneer and leader in the construction software space and a consistently recognized employer. We have earned Best Companies to Work for in Texas honors for 18 consecutive years and have been named a USA Today Top Workplace. HCSS has also been recognized by Built In as a Best Place to Work in Greater Houston and by Construction Executive for our technology innovation, reflecting our strong culture, industry leadership, and commitment to excellence.
WHO WE NEED:
As a Senior DevOps Engineer with a focus on Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), you will play a key role in driving infrastructure resilience, availability, and operational excellence across our cloud environments. A core responsibility of this role is managing and optimizing Azure SQL Elastic Pools, ensuring performance, cost-efficiency, observability, and automation are aligned with business objectives. You will lead initiatives around high availability, disaster recovery, incident response, and reliability automation. Your expertise in Azure or AWS, observability tools such as Grafana, and scalable infrastructure will be essential to ensuring our systems are robust, performant, and recoverable.
Qualifications:
- 8+ years of experience in DevOps or SRE roles with a strong focus on cloud infrastructure and systems reliability
- 3+ years of hands-on experience with managing Azure SQL Elastic Pools, including performance tuning, scaling, and automation
- 5+ years of expertise in Azure cloud services including networking, compute, databases, and identity
- 3+ years of experience applying SRE principles including SLIs, SLOs, and incident management best practices
- Extensive experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Bicep, or ARM templates
- Extensive experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines with tools like Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
- Strong scripting skills using Azure CLI and PowerShell for automation and operational tasks
- Experience with monitoring and observability platforms, ideally Grafana, or a strong foundation in similar tools
Soft Skills:
- Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving abilities.
- Excellent communication skills and a collaborative mindset to work with cross-functional teams.
- Ability to work independently, manage multiple tasks, and prioritize efficiently.
- A proactive attitude toward continuous improvement and learning.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Managed 10+ Elastic pools and 100+ databases in Azure
- Advanced level certifications on cloud infrastructure like Az-400 or equivalent
Role Responsibilities:
Azure Elastic Pool Management:
- Take ownership of the design, scaling, and optimization of Azure SQL Elastic Pools
- Monitor and tune pool performance to ensure efficiency and SLA compliance
- Establish observability and alerting for SQL resource consumption, errors, and performance anomalies
- Automate provisioning, scaling, and failover using infrastructure and scripting tools
- Collaborate with database and application teams to align on resource usage strategies
High Availability and Disaster Recovery:
- Design and implement highly available and fault tolerant systems
- Develop and maintain disaster recovery strategies across critical services
- Perform regular failover testing, documentation, and validation of recovery procedures
- Work closely with infrastructure and development teams to ensure business continuity objectives are met
Monitoring, Observability, and Automation:
- Implement and manage observability stacks with logs, metrics, traces, and alerting
- Create dashboards and alerts in Grafana or similar platforms to track key system indicators
- Develop automated solutions for provisioning, monitoring, and maintenance tasks
- Continuously improve system visibility and reduce time to detect and resolve issues
- Assist in the automation of performance testing to proactively identify bottlenecks, validate scalability and ensure reliable system behavior
Incident Management and Operational Excellence:
- Establish and refine incident response processes, escalation workflows, and resolution protocols
- Lead root cause analysis, post-incident reviews, and continuous improvement efforts, including following up to ensure identified improvements to the application or process are implemented.
- Develop and maintain runbooks, diagnostic tools, and automated remediation solutions
- Champion a blameless culture of reliability and operational readiness across engineering teams
Cloud Infrastructure Management:
- Architect and manage scalable and secure cloud infrastructure in Azure or AWS
- Provision and manage services including compute, networking, storage, and containerized workloads
- Continuously monitor performance, latency, and uptime to ensure system health
- Apply cost optimization practices while aligning infrastructure with business goals
Infrastructure as Code (IaC):
- Define and implement infrastructure using tools such as Terraform
- Maintain modular, version-controlled infrastructure code that supports environment consistency
- Apply automation and policy enforcement to reduce drift and improve auditability
- Ensure IaC best practices are embedded in the development lifecycle
Collaboration and Leadership:
- Mentor and support junior DevOps engineers through code reviews, knowledge sharing, and technical guidance
- Partner with cross-functional teams including development, security, and database operations to drive initiatives
- Act as a subject matter expert in SRE practices and reliability-driven engineering
- Lead continuous improvement efforts across infrastructure and operations processes
Travel Requirements:
- Remote Requirements
- Employees will be expected to come into the office on a periodic basis.
- Baseline expectations for roles are as follows but may fluctuate based on manager’s discretion:
- Individual Contributor - Up to 2x per year
- Employees will be expected to attend HCSS sponsored events per manager discretion (ex. UGM)
BENEFITS & PERKS:
Part of our mission is to provide a great life for our employees. We believe that when our people are happy, they do their best work. Some of the benefits and perks we offer include:
- Flexibility to work Remotely
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage with company-paid and employee-paid options
- Paid holidays, sick days, and personal time off
- Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) that foster connection and inclusion
- On-site amenities including a covered basketball court, soccer field, track, pickleball/tennis courts, gym, etc.
- Dog-friendly campus and WiFi-accessible courtyards
- 401(k) with a 5% company match
- Coverage for employee professional development and wellness
- And more!