DevOps Engineer, Legal Innovation and Technology Lab - Clinical Fellow (Remote)

This DevOps role will work primarily within Suffolk University Law School’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab (LIT Lab), which is located both within Suffolk’s nationally ranked Clinical Programs and the Law School’s nationally recognized Legal Innovation and Technology Center (LIT Center). The mission of the LIT Lab is to apply technologies and design processes to improve access to civil legal services for the public. The LIT Lab provides legal tech and data science consulting services to organizational clients, including courts, while also engaging in independent research and product development. The LIT Lab enrolls and works with a broad range of law students each semester for credit and pay, preparing our students for careers in the future of legal technology.

Responsibilities

This position will support the backend of the Lab’s efforts to make civil legal processes more accessible to the public through electronic court filing initiatives across multiple states. That effort has already helped tens of thousands of litigants access legal forms, and applicants can learn more here. This position will help expand Docassemble hosting and e-filing for courts. The position adds new capacity and maintains existing capacity. The position will be focused on spinning up new services as necessary, observing and monitoring existing services, maintaining reliability of those services, and investigating incidents, all while accelerating development and keeping maintenance costs low. While the position will work with the rest of the lab to chart high level goals and features, the position will have the freedom to chart its own path to achieve those goals.

As time permits, the DevOps role will also assist with documentation, testing, and development of the Lab’s other ongoing software development projects, which are primarily built in Python (Flask or FastAPI), Docassemble, JavaScript/Next.JS, and Java. The Developer will report directly to Professor Christina Miller, Associate Director of Clinical Programs. As a member of the LIT Lab, the Developer’s work will be directly overseen by Practitioners in Residence and LIT Lab Co-Directors, David Colarusso and Quinten Steenhuis. The Developer will have the benefit of mentorship and supervision by the Lab’s experienced staff of developers, attorneys, and academics, but may be required to work more independently than in many development shops.

Duration and Compensation

This position will begin as soon as possible. The Developer position is a full-time, 12-month grant and contract-funded position with the possibility of annual extensions, depending on ongoing funding. This salary is competitive for an educational setting, and the position includes generous benefits.

Required Qualifications

• A relevant degree from a 4-year college and at least 3 years of relevant work experience
  • alternatively, 7 years of relevant work experience
• Independent authorization to work in the United States (e.g., this position will not support a work visa)
• Experience writing and communicating about technical information
• Ability to work with others as part of a team, combined with ability to work independently
• Proficiency in Python
• Experience releasing and maintaining production web services, including usage of the following technologies:
  • cloud deployments (i.e. AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • Docker
  • version control tools
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Linux
  • Database / SQL technology
• On-call/incident experience
  • The position may share limited on call for some critical services
  • Modern web application security knowledge

Bonus Qualifications

• Technologies in our specific stack:
  • AWS, Fly.io, Papertrail, GitHub Actions, Ubuntu Server, and Postgresql
• Experience with metrics and monitoring tools
  • Such as prometheus and grafana
• Experience in modern python packaging and pip
• Experience with Linux ops capabilities, i.e. systemd, syslog-ng, nginx, redis
• Proficiency in +1 other programming language
  • other parts of our stack include Java and JavaScript
• Automation of services and release processes
• Comfort working in the open and with other Open-Source communities
  • crafting detail-oriented Pull Requests
  • working with communities to merge features upstream

Required Application Documents

Cover letter demonstrating interest in the role Resume or CV Code sample (if you do not have any representative code you can share, please apply and we will find alternatives)

Salary

Salary: $71,250 - $95,000