About the role
OVERVIEW
A thriving, mission-driven multimedia organization, NPR produces award-winning news, information, and music programming in partnership with hundreds of independent public radio stations across the nation. The NPR audience values information, creativity, curiosity, and social responsibility – and our employees do too. We are innovators and leaders in diverse fields, from journalism and digital media to IT and development. Every day, our employees and member stations touch the lives of millions worldwide.
Across our organization, we’re building a workplace where collaboration is essential, diverse voices are heard, and inclusion is the key to our success. We are committed to doing the right thing in our journalism and in every role at NPR. This means that integrity, adherence to our ethical standards, and compliance with legal obligations are fundamental responsibilities for every employee at NPR.
Intro to Position
NPR is seeking a DevOps Engineer to join our cross-discipline technical product team. In this role, you will build and maintain the products, services, and tools that power the NPR Network, serving millions of public media consumers daily.
We are looking for an adaptable, curious systems professional who has deep technical knowledge of cloud-based administration, strong scripting skills, and a passion for automation and cloud orchestration. Working closely with developers and product managers, you will ensure our systems are scalable, robust, and highly performant.
This is a union-represented role covered under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement with NABET-CWA DMU.
Responsibilities
- Infrastructure Automation: Build, maintain, and optimize robust CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure deployment workflows using automated orchestration tools and scripting languages.
- System Administration: Administer, monitor, and troubleshoot Linux/Unix-based compute instances across on-premises and multi-cloud environments.
- Cloud & Platform Engineering: Support, deploy, and scale workloads within cloud environments, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.
- Scalability & Performance: Investigate, analyze, and optimize application performance and infrastructure scaling limits to support peak traffic events.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Standardize environments and maintain reproducible state models by developing clean, modular Infrastructure as Code.
- Database & Storage Management: Monitor, configure, and troubleshoot relational databases and storage architectures to ensure optimal data flow and integrity.
- Content Delivery & Edge Routing: Configure and manage Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to optimize media delivery and caching strategies.
- Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: Write and maintain detailed, clear system documentation and architectural diagrams to support team alignment and operational resilience.
- On-Call & System Reliability: Participate in a shared engineering on-call rotation to quickly diagnose, mitigate, and resolve production system incidents.
The above duties and responsibilities are not an exhaustive list of required responsibilities, duties and skills. Other duties may be assigned, and this job description can be modified at any time.
Minimum Qualifications
- 2 to 3 years of professional experience in a DevOps(AWS), Systems Engineering, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) role.
- a Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field may be substituted for 1–2 years of experience.
- Strong hands-on proficiency in Linux/Unix system administration.
- Hands-on experience writing automation scripts using languages like Python, Bash, or similar administrative scripting tools.
- Practical experience utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles and cloud orchestration technologies.
- Experience with virtualization technologies and containerization.
- Basic understanding of relational database administration, storage technologies, and CDN concepts.
- Active willingness and eligibility to participate in a scheduled on-call support rotation.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience integrating, configuring, and tuning infrastructure monitoring and application performance management (APM) tools.
- Experience participating in large-scale application migration projects from on-premises environments to cloud platforms.
Required Skills/Competencies
- Automation-First Mindset: The ability to identify repetitive manual operational tasks and replace them with reliable, automated code-driven workflows.
- Systems Troubleshooting: Diagnostic capabilities to isolate and resolve performance bottlenecks across networking, databases, and server configurations.
- Architectural Documentation: Ability to clearly document architecture, workflows, and infrastructure changes (including system diagrams).
- Collaborative Communication: Strong interpersonal skills to work as an integrated member of a cross-functional technical product team.
Education Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical work experience.
Work Location & Requirements
- DMU or NPR Hybrid Permitted: This is a hybrid permitted role. Some aspects of this role require duties better performed at an NPR facility. The employee will be required to be in the office at the Washington, D.C. location at least 10 days a year. The employee must also reside in an NPR-supported location based on the number of on-site days they choose.
Job Type
- This is a full-time, exempt position.
Compensation
Salary Range: The U.S.-based anticipated salary range for this opportunity is $107,300.24 - $119,597.71 plus benefits. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum salaries NPR expects to provide for new hires for the position across all US locations.
NPR Benefits: NPR provides comprehensive benefits for employees and dependents. Regular, full-time employees scheduled to work 30 hours or more per week are eligible to enroll in NPR’s benefits options. Benefits include access to health and wellness, paid time off, and financial well-being. Plan options include medical, dental, vision, life/ accidental death and dismemberment, long-term disability, short-term disability, and voluntary retirement savings to all eligible NPR employees.
Does this sound like you? If so, we want to hear from you.
#LI-HYBRID
NPR is an Equal Opportunity Employer. NPR is committed to being an inclusive workplace that welcomes diverse and unique perspectives, all working toward the same goal – to create a more informed public. Qualified applicants receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, national origin, ancestry, age, religion, religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, lactation, and reproductive health decisions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, transgender status, gender non-conforming status, intersex status, sexual stereotypes, nationality, citizenship status, personal appearance, marital status, family status, family responsibilities, military status, veteran status, mental and physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, genetic characteristics of yourself or a family member, political views and affiliation, unemployment status, protective order status, status as a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking, or any other basis prohibited under applicable law.
If you are a person with a disability needing assistance with the application process, please reach out to employeerelations@npr.org.
You may read NPR’s privacy policy to learn about how NPR may handle information you submit with any application.
Want more NPR? Explore the stories behind the stories on our NPR Extra blog. Get social with NPR Extra on Facebook and Instagram. Find more career opportunities at NPR.org/careers.
