NECC Lead DevOps Engineer

Your success is a train ride away
As we move America's workforce toward the future, Amtrak connects businesses and communities across the country. We employ more than 20,000 diverse, energetic professionals in a variety of career fields throughout the United States. The safety of our passengers, our employees, the public and our operating environment is our priority, and the success of our railroad is due to our employees.

Are you ready to join our team?
Our values of 'Do the Right Thing, Excel Together and Put Customers First' are at the heart of what matters most to us, and our Core Capabilities, 'Building Trust, Accountability, Effective Communication, Customer Focus, and Proactive Safety & Security' are what every employee needs to know and do to be most impactful at Amtrak. By living the Amtrak values, focusing on our capabilities, and actively embracing and fostering diverse ideas, backgrounds, and perspectives, together we will honor our past and make Amtrak a company of the future.

Job Summary
At Amtrak, the Lead DevOps Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for ensuring the resilience, scalability, and security of our digital platforms. This role combines software engineering, systems engineering, and a deep operational mindset to improve reliability through automation, observability, and proactive incident response. The successful candidate will drive architectural decisions around SLOs, error budgets, infrastructure as code, and deployment strategies while mentoring engineers and standardizing practices across teams. They will collaborate cross-functionally to implement scalable solutions that align with our goals for service health, security, and development velocity.

Essential Functions

• CI/CD & Release
• Architect progressive delivery (canary/blue-green/feature flags) of DevSecOps CI/CD pipelines
• Automate rollback/fail-forward and release evidence capture.
• Standardize quality gates (tests, perf/chaos pre-prod).
• Platform (IaC, Cloud, Containers)
• Publish hardened base images and golden IaC modules with guardrails.
• Enforce k8s/RBAC, network policies, quotas; secret standards.
• Design multienv promotion workflows with policy checks.
• Observability, SLOs & Incidents
• Establish SLOs/error budgets; drive cross-team reliability improvements.
• Bake runbooks into alerts; add synthetic/load tests to pipelines.
• Lead major incidents; land systemic fixes (not just patches).
• Security & Compliance
• Enforce short-lived creds, zero-trust patterns, and attestation/signing.
• Automate compliance checks and evidence collection.
• Partner with security on threat-modeling for platform changes. .
• Automation & Tooling
• Create internal libraries/CLIs with telemetry and docs.
• Measure automation ROI (time saved, error-rate drop).
• Orchestrate complex workflows (e.g., Step Functions/Argo Workflows).
• Platform DX, Docs & Collaboration
• Own a platform capability end-to-end (roadmap, SLAs, upgrades).
• Drive adoption of best practices across multiple teams.
• Write ADRs and decision logs that clarify trade-offs.
• Networking, Data Resilience & FinOps
• Define/validate RPO/RTO; automate restore drills and reports.
• Tune critical paths for latency/throughput and cost.
• Forecast impacts of migrations; deliver measurable cost/perf wins.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical discipline.
• At least 5 years of experience in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering roles with leadership experience in automation and infrastructure reliability.
• 3+ years hands-on experience in high-availability production environments with cloud-native security and observability tooling.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science or equivalent.
• Certifications: AWS DevOps Engineer Pro, Terraform Associate, CKA, or SRE-focused credentials.
• Experience with developer portals (e.g., Backstage), service mesh (e.g., Istio), and security tooling (e.g., Vault, Falco, Trivy).
• Knowledge of DORA metrics, reliability KPIs, and engineering effectiveness measurement frameworks.
• Background in regulated environments (e.g., PCI, HIPAA, FedRAMP) with experience implementing security automation at scale.

Knowledge, Skills, And Abilities

• Deep expertise in AWS (or equivalent cloud platform), especially in compute, networking, IAM, and monitoring.
• Proficiency in Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Docker, and Linux systems.
• Strong knowledge of observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog, CloudWatch).
• Experience implementing and managing CI/CD systems with security tollgates and rollback logic.
• Strong scripting skills in Python, Go, or Bash for automation and tooling.
• In-depth understanding of SRE practices including incident response, SLO/SLA management, chaos engineering, and capacity modeling.
• Familiarity with Git and GitOps patterns.
• Proven track record of creating shared tooling and documentation that promotes operational excellence.

The salary/hourly range is $103,700.00 – $134, Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, etc. Depending on an employee's assigned worksite or location, Amtrak may consider a geo-pay differential to be applied to the employee's base salary. Amtrak may offer additional incentive and pay programs to recognize and reward our employees, including a short-term incentive bonus based upon factors such as individual and company performance that is commensurate with the level of the position and/or long-term incentive plan compensation. In addition to your salary, Amtrak offers a comprehensive benefit package that includes health, dental, and vision plans; health savings accounts; wellness programs; flexible spending accounts; 401K retirement plan with employer match; life insurance; short and long term disability insurance; paid time off; back-up care; adoption assistance; surrogacy assistance; reimbursement of education expenses; Public Service Loan Forgiveness eligibility; Railroad Retirement sickness and retirement benefits; and rail pass privileges. Learn more about our benefits offerings here.

Requisition ID:
165635

Work Arrangement:
06-Onsite 4/5 Days Click here for more information about work arrangements at Amtrak.

Relocation Offered:
No

Travel Requirements:
Up to 25%

You power our progress through your performance.
We want your work at Amtrak to be more than a job. We want your career at Amtrak to be a fulfilling experience where you find challenging work, rewarding opportunities, respect among colleagues, and attractive compensation. Amtrak maintains a culture that values high performance and recognizes individual employee contributions.

Amtrak is committed to a safe workplace free of drugs and alcohol. All Amtrak positions requires a pre-employment background check that includes prior employment verification, a criminal history check and a pre-employment drug screen.

Candidates who test positive for marijuana will be disqualified, regardless of any state or local statute, ordinance, regulation, or other law that legalizes or decriminalizes the use or possession of marijuana, whether for medical, recreational, or other use. Amtrak's pre-employment drug testing program is administered in accordance with DOT regulations and applicable law.

In accordance with DOT regulations (49 CFR

• 40.25), Amtrak is required to obtain prior drug and alcohol testing records for applicants/employees intending to perform safety-sensitive duties for covered Department of Transportation positions. If an applicant/employee refuses to provide written consent for Amtrak to obtain these records, the individual will not be permitted to perform safety-sensitive functions.

In accordance with federal law governing security checks of covered individuals for providers of public transportation (Title 6 U.S.C.

• 1143), Amtrak is required to screen applicants for any permanent or interim disqualifying criminal offenses.

Note that any education requirement listed above may be deemed satisfied if you have an equivalent combination of education, training and experience.

Amtrak is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race/color, to include traits historically associated with race, including but not limited to, hair texture and hairstyles such as braids, locks and twists, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related conditions, such as lactation), national origin/ethnicity, disability (intellectual, mental and physical), veteran status, marital status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, genetic information, citizenship or any other personal characteristics protected by law.