At Robots & Pencils, we build meaningful, scalable digital products that solve real business problems.
We're looking for a DevOps/Backend Engineer (Level 4) to own infrastructure, CI/CD, and backend services for a large-scale platform serving a major public university. You will be responsible for maintaining and evolving a multi-repo AWS serverless architecture spanning Lambda functions, Step Functions, DynamoDB, API Gateway, SQS, CloudFront, and containerized services running on ECR — all provisioned through Terraform.
This is not a greenfield project. You'll be joining a mature, production system with real users depending on it daily. The platform orchestrates complex business workflows through event-driven serverless pipelines, integrating with multiple external enterprise APIs and internal microservices. You'll work closely with backend and frontend engineers to keep this system reliable, observable, and shipping safely across multiple environments.
By joining us, you leverage our Advanced AWS Partnership and the highly exclusive AWS Patterns Partnership, a distinction held by only 11 companies worldwide out of 190,000.
What You'll Do
- Backend Development & Operations
• Develop and maintain Node.js and Python Lambda functions powering REST APIs, data aggregation, and business logic
• Build and optimize Step Function workflows orchestrating multi-service operations
• Integrate with external enterprise APIs and internal microservices, handling authentication, rate limiting, and error propagation
• Implement deferred processing patterns using SQS for handling concurrent and long-running operations
- Infrastructure & IaC
• Own and evolve Terraform modules provisioning API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, Step Functions, SQS, CloudFront, and ECR across multiple AWS accounts
• Manage multi-account AWS environments with proper IAM boundaries, secrets management (Vault), and S3 state backends
• Design and implement infrastructure changes that support zero-downtime deployments and safe rollback strategies
• Maintain and optimize Docker image builds and ECR lifecycle policies for containerized services
- CI/CD & Release Engineering
• Own Jenkins pipelines that build, test, and promote artifacts through staged environments with manual approval gates
• Improve build reliability, speed, and developer feedback loops across multiple repositories
• Implement and maintain pre-commit hooks, automated testing gates, and lint/type-check enforcement
• Coordinate production deployments following established release procedures
- Observability & Reliability
• Build monitoring, alerting, and logging infrastructure for a distributed serverless system
• Troubleshoot production issues spanning API Gateway, Lambda cold starts, Step Function timeouts, and DynamoDB throttling
• Establish and maintain SLOs for critical user-facing workflows
• Improve error handling and retry strategies across event-driven workflows
Required Skills & Experience
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Deep hands-on experience with AWS serverless services: Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB, SQS, CloudFront, ECR
- Strong proficiency writing and maintaining Terraform at scale
- Production experience with CI/CD pipeline design and operation (Jenkins preferred)
- Solid understanding of containerization (Docker) and image registry management (ECR)
- Experience with multi-environment promotion strategies and deployment safety patterns
Nice to Have
- Experience with AWS Step Functions orchestration patterns (parallel, retry, catch, map states)
- Experience integrating with legacy enterprise systems and third-party APIs
- Experience with EdTech platforms or student information systems
Why Join Robots & Pencils?
- • Work on a production platform that directly impacts real users at scale
• Operate within a mature, multi-repo AWS serverless architecture with real complexity
• Collaborate with experienced engineers across backend, frontend, and infrastructure disciplines
• Grow within a globally recognized AWS partner ecosystem with access to cutting-edge cloud practices
• Influence DevOps culture, tooling, and reliability standards across the engineering organization
