Senior DevOps Engineer

For over a century, the Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau of California (WCIRB) has been California's trusted, objective provider of actuarially based information and research, advisory pure premium rates and educational services integral to a healthy workers' compensation system. The WCIRB is a California unincorporated, private, nonprofit association comprised of all companies licensed to transact workers' compensation insurance in California. The operations of the WCIRB are funded primarily by membership fees and assessments; no state money is used to fund its operations. The WCIRB is a stable company and a proven leader in the workers’ compensation insurance industry nationwide.

The WCIRB performs a number of functions to accurately measure the cost of providing workers' compensation benefits and ensure a healthy workers’ compensation system. To learn more about our company, please visit About Us | WCIRB California. The WCIRB employs approximately 175 people with the average tenure of over 10 years. We are committed to fostering a healthy, safe and diverse work environment leading to a dedicated, collaborative and innovative workforce This is a hybrid position where approximately 40% of the work time is spent at the home office in San Francisco, California.

Summary

The Senior DevOps Engineer must possess strong problem-solving, analytical, and deep technical skills in Azure cloud, container, automation ecosystems, and collaboration with software engineering, QA, security, data, and infrastructure teams. The role drives pipeline standards and controls, integration across build/test/deploy tooling, and SDLC governance to ensure predictable, compliant, and high-quality software delivery for the WCIRB. An individual who is proactively constructive, comfortable offering alternative solutions, and dedicated to continuous improvement.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Lead implementation, and management of our Azure cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices.

Design, and implement secure, scalable pipelines and platform automation using tools like Azure DevOps Pipelines to support multiple teams across environments (dev/test/stage/prod).

Establish and enforce pipeline controls and standards (branching strategies, approvals, policy gates, artifact integrity, segregation of duties) aligned to SDLC governance and compliance frameworks.

Integrate and orchestrate quality, security, and reliability tooling into pipelines (unit/integration tests, SAST/DAST/secret scanning, dependency checks, etc.).

Automate infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and GitOps practices (e.g., Bicep, ADO) across cloud and on-prem environments.

Enable release management (environment promotion, rollback strategies) and maintain artifact repositories and package signing.

Build and maintain container platforms (Docker, Azure containers), including autoscaling.

Implement security best practices, manage secrets, and ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations in collaboration with security team.

Implement observability (logging, metrics, tracing, alerting) using services like Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and Log Analytics to ensure the health and performance of cloud resources, applications, proactively identify issues and reduce MTTR via runbooks and automation.

Perform capacity planning, cost optimization, and performance tuning for build agents, clusters, and shared platform services.

Automate routine operational tasks and administrative workflows using scripting languages such as PowerShell, Bashor Azure CLI to improve efficiency and reduce manual effort.

Develop, test, and maintain backup/restore, DR, and platform resiliency patterns for CI/CD and runtime systems; participate in incident response and post-incident reviews.

Champion SDLC governance by codifying controls, change management, and evidence collection to meet audit/compliance needs.

Research and prototype new DevOps and platform solutions; document standards, reference architectures, and runbooks; mentor teammates and lead knowledge sharing.

Collaborate across teams (engineering, QA, security, IT operations) to align integration points, simplify developer workflows, and remove delivery bottlenecks.

Act as a force multiplier for development teams by helping troubleshoot local build issues, optimizing solution file structures, and advising on code-level configuration for cloud-native adoption.

Partner with engineers to profile and optimize application performance within Azure App Services and Functions, going beyond simple resource scaling.

Education and Experience

Must have a degree in Computer Science Engineering or equivalent work experience

5+years of hands-on experience as a Microsoft Azure Cloud senior DevOps Engineer

3+ years of prior experience as a software developer (preferably inC#/.NET Core ecosystem).

Demonstrated ownership of pipeline standards and controls, SDLC governance implementations, and audit-ready evidence automation.

Deep knowledge of Azure services relevant to DevOps, such as Azure DevOps, Azure Functions, and Azure Monitor including multi-stage pipelines, approvals, reusable templates, and environment strategies.

Experience with containerization technologies like Docker and orchestrators like Kubernetes (AKS).

Scripting/automation proficiency (e.g., Bash, PowerShell, Python).

Infrastructure-as-Code experience (e.g. Bicep) and configuration management.

Experience working with information security and compliance, understanding vulnerabilities, secure file transmission, key and certificate management, and identity-aware pipelines (e.g., OIDC workload identity).

Strong understanding of Azure networking, identity management, and security (Key Vault, Managed Identities, RBAC).

Ability to read and debug application code to distinguish between infrastructure failures and application errors (e.g., analyzing stack traces, memory leaks in App Services, or cold start issues in Azure Functions).

Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to document complex technical concepts clearly.

Ability to tailor messaging to audiences with divergent depth in software delivery, security, and infrastructure.

Strong cross-functional collaboration skills; able to influence without direct authority and facilitate decisions among engineering, security, and operations.

Demonstrated ability to adapt to new technologies and learn quickly

Experience in Agile/Scrum methodology

Nice to have:

Experience supporting data pipelines using Azure Data Factory (ADF) for data orchestration.

Experience in integrating DBT workflows into pipelines to support data transformation automation and version-controlled data modeling.

Perks & Benefits Our employees enjoy a state of the art, energy-efficient, open work environment that nurtures collaboration and creativity. At the WCIRB, we go the extra mile to keep our employees happy and healthy.

Proud to be recognized as a Plan Sponsor of the Year finalist for our commitment to retirement readiness through strong 401k and pension offerings.

Some of our perks include:

Hybrid work environment (40% onsite 60% remote)

Medical, dental and vision benefits

Competitive PTO Program

Wellness benefits

401K and pension plan

Social activities

Community volunteer involvement

The successful candidate will reside in California and will work from our headquarters in San Francisco at least 40% of the time. We are NOT able to pay for relocation costs for candidates or to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time. Thank you for your interest in the WCIRB!

Pay: $130,150.00 - $175,000.00 per year

Benefits:

401(k)

401(k) matching

Dental insurance

Flexible schedule

Flexible spending account

Health savings account

Paid time off

Referral program

Retirement plan

Application Question(s):

Are you legally authorized to work for any employer in the US?

This is a hybrid position that requires on-site presence in addition to working remotely. Are you within commute distance to San Francisco, California? If not, are you willing to relocate at your own expense?

Do you now or will you in the future need sponsorship to work for WCIRB?

How many years of hands-on experience do you have with Microsoft Azure?

Have you worked in a production cloud environment? Which cloud platforms? (AWS / Azure / GCP)

Which Azure services have you worked with directly?

Have you led or owned DevOps initiatives (CI/CD, cloud migration, infrastructure automation)?

Have you implemented Infrastructure as Code in Azure? Tools used?

Have you built CI/CD pipelines from scratch?

Work Location: Hybrid remote in San Francisco, CA 94104