Backend Programmer / DevOps Engineer at Palladium Group

Requisition ID: req12547

Project Overview and Role

• Data.FI is a five-year global project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to support the HIV and COVID-19 response.
• Data.FI partners with programs to accelerate and sustain access to high-quality data to expedite HIV and COVID-19 epidemic control and maintenance. By improving global, regional, national, and community/local in-depth analyses of HIV and COVID-19 epidemiologic and programmatic data, Data.FI expedites program achievements to improve client services and attain and sustain control of the epidemics.
• Data.FI supports host country governments to enhance existing health information systems (HIS), informing management responses to gaps in programming and sustaining impact by supporting local partner transition.

Purpose of Position

• Palladium is seeking to employ a skilled Programmer/DevOps Engineer with high levels of experience in back-end programming and DevOps, who will work closely with the health informatics system (HIS) software solution developers to develop of server-side logic, maintenance, and definition of the central database, while ensuring high performance and responsiveness to requests from the front-end.
• (S)he will also be responsible for the integration of the front-end elements. As a DevOps engineer, (s)he will support the maturity of the microservices architecture for different solutions to achieve full or near-full automation and orchestration of tools.
• (S)he will also support the development teams to improve Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment(CI/CD) tooling and ensuring that they adhere to a strict release management cadence through automation.
• (S)he will additionally support the Quality Assurance team to deploy open-source tools for test case development and execution and develop tools for continuous monitoring of system health and security of all our technological products.
• The Programmer/DevOps Engineer will report to the Health Informatics Lead. This is a full-time position with a  contract for 1 year, renewable subject to availability of funding.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities

• Developing and Managing APIs resources for LAMISPlus, NOMIS and related system
• Focus on coding and debugging.
• Defining and communicating technical and design requirements.
• Building a high-quality reusable code that can be used in future developments.
• Creating sustainable and functional web applications with clean codes.
• Learning about new technologies and staying up to date with current best practices.
• Conducting UI tests and optimizing performance.
• Automating processes with open-source tools for CI/CD and testing.
• Analysing, executing, and streamlining DevOps practices.
• Facilitating development processes and operations.
• Establishing a continuous build environment to accelerate software deployment and development processes.
• Instituting a DevOps culture within the HIS solutions development team
• Architecting overall, comprehensive, and efficient practices.
• Guiding developers and operations teams to resolve issues.
• Implementing and improving monitoring and alerts across the suite of HIS products by automating performance monitoring, reporting any downtimes and carrying out root cause analysis.
• Designing and improving infrastructure and team collaboration.
• Designing a setup environment for users, making the experience better, more automated and intuitive.
• Keeping all code changes within a single system enabling modifications and testing.
• Optimizing product or update release cycles.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or relevant field.
• At least five (5) years of professional experience directly supporting the development, operations, maintenance and/or security of mission critical systems.  
• Extensive DevOps experience including case handling and resolution, platform security, programming and scripting (Bash, Perl, Python, Java), server management (Linux, Windows, UNIX), and database scripting (SQL, NoSQL and distributed databases).
• Excellent knowledge of software development and software testing methodologies along with configuration management practices in Unix and Linux-based environments.
• Sound knowledge of cloud-based environments.
• Ability to create APIs (REST and SOAP) services is desirable.
• Hands on experience in working with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
• Experience in handling automated deployment CI/CD tools.
• Ability to review deployment and delivery pipelines i.e., implement initiatives to minimize chances of failure, identify bottlenecks and troubleshoot issues.
• Experience in engaging closely with solutions architects and operations teams to deliver highly available and scalable services with minimal/zero downtime.
• Demonstrable experience with Application, Infrastructure Delivery Automation, Orchestration, Configuration Management and Testing tools.
• Excellent knowledge of Micro Service Architecture, RESTfull web service, Spring web socket, JAXB, JSONB, Gradle, Maven, Junit.   
• Experience with databases (MySQL, H2, PostgreSQL) and their integration into web, mobile applications.
• Excellent knowledge of SQL and hands on experience with ORM frameworks such as Hibernate/JPA.