Sr DevOps Engineer Specialist - 90405117 - Washington

Date:  Feb 24, 2026
Location: 

Washington, DC, US, 20001

Company:  Amtrak

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

The Sr DevOps Engineer Specialist supports the reliability, availability, and performance of Amtrak's digital systems. This role is responsible for building monitoring systems, automating deployments, participating in incident response, and working alongside development teams to ensure production readiness. The engineer will help implement best practices around infrastructure-as-code, observability, and secure deployments while contributing to documentation and service maturity.

Essential Functions

  • CI/CD & Release · Build reliable pipelines with caching/parallelism and gated deploys with modern DevSecOps principles · Implement provenance basics (SBOM, artifact signatures where available). · Define rollback steps and pre-prod checks with service owners.
  • Platform (IaC, Cloud, Containers) · Compose reusable Terraform/CFN/CDK modules; add validations/linters. · Operate k8s/ECS workloads (probes, HPA, config/secrets management). · Manage image lifecycle (base images, tagging, retention).
  • Observability, SLOs & Incidents · Create actionable dashboards/alerts; reduce noisy alerts. · Define SLIs with teams; document runbooks tied to alerts. · Lead smaller incidents; drive follow-ups to completion.
  • Security & Compliance · Integrate SAST/DAST/dependency & container scans into CI/CD. · Centralize secrets and rotate them; enforce least privilege in IAM. · Capture deployment evidence for audits.
  • Automation & Tooling · Build resilient automation (idempotency, retries, error handling). · Package scripts as reusable CLIs/modules; add unit tests. · Expose useful automations via simple APIs or jobs.
  • Platform DX, Docs & Collaboration · Publish “golden” templates/examples that reduce onboarding friction. · Mentor juniors; facilitate focused design/ops reviews. · Keep service and platform docs current and searchable.
  • Networking, Data Resilience & FinOps · Configure L7 routing and cert management; basic WAF/CDN usage. · Implement and verify backups/restores; document RPO/RTO basics. · Track build/infra costs; right-size environments.

Minimum Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field — or equivalent hands-on experience.
  • 5+ years of experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or infrastructure support roles.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Familiarity with containerized workloads (Docker, Kubernetes, ECS).
  • Exposure to security tools or compliance requirements.
  • Certifications in AWS, Terraform, or Kubernetes a plus.
  • Experience using log aggregation tools (e.g., ELK Stack, FluentBit, Loki).
  • 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

  • Experience with one or more cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
  • Understands core cloud services (e.g., S3, EFS, Kinesis) and basic troubleshooting techniques
  • Proficiency with Linux-based systems and shell scripting.
  • Familiarity with IaC (e.g., CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible) and version control (Git).
  • Basic understanding of monitoring and alerting systems.
  • Willingness to participate in incident response and service ownership.
  • Strong desire to learn and grow in automation, observability, and SRE practices.

Environmental Conditions/Physical Demands

The salary/hourly range is $86,500.00 – $111,996.00. 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:166010

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.