DevOps Engineer

Simpalm is hiring a  Senior DevOps Engineer  for one of our direct clients in Dallas, TX. The role is for someone who thrives on build and release management. You will own the full path from commit to production for .NET services running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). You will design pipelines that make trunk-based development safe, fast, and uneventful.

The client’s build and release environment spans both  Azure DevOps  and  GitHub Actions . You will make both ecosystems work well, consolidating where it makes sense and keeping both healthy where it doesn’t.

Key Responsibilities:

• CI/CD ownership:  Own the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions for .NET applications and services.
• Trunk-based development:  Drive practices such as short-lived branches, fast and reliable PR validation, feature flags, and continuous integration into main.
• Progressive delivery:  Build and maintain blue/green, canary, and ring-based rollouts into AKS, with automated rollback on failed health gates.
• Release standards:  Define and enforce a versioning and tagging strategy, artifact promotion across environments, release notes automation, and change tracking.
• Pipeline performance and reliability:  Reduce build times and flaky test noise. Treat pipeline reliability and developer feedback loops as first-class products with measurable SLOs.
• Container lifecycle:  Manage container builds and image lifecycle (Docker, Azure Container Registry), including base image hygiene, caching strategy, and multi-stage build optimization.
• Infrastructure as Code:  Author and maintain IaC using Bicep and/or Terraform, Helm charts, and Kustomize overlays, so environments are reproducible and drift is visible.
• Security in the pipeline:  Embed SAST/DAST, dependency and container scanning, SBOM generation, artifact signing and provenance, and policy-as-code gates.
• Secrets and identity:  Manage secrets and identity properly with Azure Key Vault, workload identity, and OIDC federation for pipeline authentication. Eliminate long-lived credentials.
• Release observability:  Build deployment health signals, DORA metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, MTTR), and dashboards and alerting using Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Prometheus, or Grafana.
• Developer partnership:  Work directly with development teams to unblock them, review their pipeline changes, and raise the bar on delivery practices through coaching rather than gatekeeping.
• On-call and incident response:  Participate in the on-call rotation for platform and delivery systems. Lead blameless postmortems and drive the follow-through.

Required Qualifications:

• 6+ years in DevOps, platform, or release engineering, with significant time owning build and release systems.
• Deep, practical experience with  Azure DevOps Pipelines and GitHub Actions , including YAML pipelines, templates, reusable workflows, self-hosted runners/agents, environments, and approval gates.
• Strong  Azure  experience: AKS, Container Registry, Key Vault, Entra ID / managed identity, networking fundamentals, and resource governance.
• Production  Kubernetes  experience: deployments, services, ingress, autoscaling, resource tuning, and real-world troubleshooting under pressure.
• Solid understanding of the  .NET build and packaging ecosystem : MSBuild, dotnet CLI, NuGet feeds and versioning, and multi-service solution builds.
• Demonstrated success with  trunk-based development  in a fast-moving environment. You can speak concretely about branching policy, merge queues, feature flags, and keeping main releasable at all times.
• Infrastructure as Code proficiency with Bicep, ARM, or Terraform, plus Helm for Kubernetes packaging.
• Scripting and automation in PowerShell, Bash, and/or Python. You are comfortable writing tooling, not just configuring it.
• Working knowledge of supply chain security practices and secure secrets handling in CI/CD.
• Clear written and verbal communication. You document decisions and can explain tradeoffs to both engineers and leadership.

Nice to Have:

• Experience consolidating or migrating between Azure DevOps and GitHub, or running both at scale.
• GitOps tooling such as Argo CD or Flux.
• Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd) or advanced AKS networking.
• Policy-as-code with OPA/Gatekeeper or Azure Policy.
• Experience in a regulated or audited environment (SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA), building controls that satisfy auditors without slowing teams down.
• Database deployment automation (EF Core migrations, DACPAC, Flyway/Liquibase).
• Performance and load testing integrated into the release pipeline.
• Azure certifications (AZ-400, AZ-104) or CKA/CKAD.

How the Team Works:

Trunk-based, small batches, deploy often. The team prefers automation over process documents, measured improvement over opinion, and shared ownership over handoffs. If you’ve been the person quietly making everyone else’s deployments faster and less scary, you’ll fit right in.