Azure DevOps Specialist (Remote)

Sparrow’s a real silicon-valley funded product company based in Alberta. As we're growing rapidly, we need our first, full-time, DevOps specialist. Actually, we call this role the DevOps Guardian - guarding against bad ideas and accidental misdeeds that affect production, release, and ultimately our customers. This has been a part-time role split among heroic members of the development team, but it's time to level up.

Every day, Sparrow helps our customers get the right information to the right employees across many distribution channels. Connected and informed employees are more productive, more engaged and happier. We believe everyone should feel that way.

At Sparrow, we are a passionate tribe with interests that range from anime to Star Trek to Dungeons and Dragons to food, good code, photography, reading… hmm, we may be a bit nerdy, but we don’t apologize for it. Our culture is centered around a few key ideas: health & family first, no blame – we’re one team – so how can we help and being the mentors, we wish we’d had earlier in our careers.

The type of people we’re looking for are the type who enjoy owning things, who love learning from others and sharing what they know, and who are highly adaptable. Being a small start-up, there’s lots of opportunity to grow and try things out.

Important - We cannot sponsor visas at this time. Therefore you must be a Canadian Citizen or be a permanent resident, or have your work status otherwise resolved, in order to apply.

AND PLEASE make sure to submit the cover letter mentioned at the very end.

In this brand-new role, you will take over ownership and responsibility for our build, release, and environments with the full support of the rest of the product team. You will also work closely with the CTO and our senior developers as a key member of the product team, championing DevOps thinking to the dev team and during the feature spec'ing process.  We refer to this role internally as the DevOps Guardian (shield and superhero costume optional ;)

Key Duties & Responsibilities

• Designing, building, testing, automating, monitoring and supporting significant components of our environments in Azure.
• Monitoring and optimizing cost, efficiency, resiliency, and more
• Contributing to technical decisions and direction in a collaborative team environment, including architecture, estimation, product planning, user story/requirement creation.
• Implementing modern Continuous Delivery  processes for releasing software to production. 
• Applying industry best practices and patterns across infrastructure and application components e.g. security, elasticity, performance.
• Applying configuration management, infrastructure provisioning , and container orchestration tooling to solve business problems. 
• Develop best of breed solutions.
• Work in an Agile environment where you will be challenged and motivated.
• Introducing/suggesting new processes and techniques.
• Demonstrate a strong commitment to Excellence and Quality

Strong Assets

• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related
• Azure DevOps Engineer or Azure Developer Associate certification
• 3+ years of Powershell automating systems like SharePoint or other parts of M365
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerization an asset

Ideal Experience

• Minimum 5 years experience in DevOps (any platform)
• 3+ years experience with Azure monitoring, maintaining, managing environments and high-load solutions
• 3+ years experience with Powershell
• 3+ years experience with managing CI/CD and release
• Significant Experience with CosmosDB, SQL, Event Hubs, DataFactory, Azure App config, Functions, and other native-Azure features
• Experience troubleshooting issues with Azure logs, performance, and other measures and indicators.
• Knowledge of modern software development practices.
• Knowledge of infrastructure design, provisioning, and management.
• Strong understanding of load balancing and regional distribution

What can Sparrow offer you?

·       A fantastic place to work and a leadership team that believes that leaders are there in service to their teams.

·       An unbelievable team who are some of the nicest and most committed professionals you’ll ever meet.

·       A competitive salary

·       Lots of growth opportunity from both a depth and breadth perspective as we grow.

·       Group benefits because we believe strongly in taking care of health and family

·       Stock options that when we became that billion-dollar unicorn start-up will be worth MAD MONEY

BEFORE YOU APPLY, please make sure to include a cover letter and tell us something about yourself (this also tells us you read the whole thing, which means you pay attention to detail):

·      Was there anything about this posting, or the video, that grabbed you?

·      What are 1-3 things you’re hoping to find in your next role?

·      Do you have a github repo with some code we can look at to see your style and approach? If so, please provide the link

·      What are you passionate about outside of tech? Star Wars? D&D? Biking? Singing? Hiking? Collecting Meteors.

Remember, there is no perfect candidate and all too often we can see a set of things we don’t have and miss all the great things we do. If you feel you’re a potential great fit and feel we might need some convincing, put it in the cover letter and make sure your resume highlights it. We’re going to read it all.

We are growing fast, so if you don’t feel that this is a fit for you right now, keep an eye on us. More is coming