Jr DevOps Engineer

Junior DevOps Engineer

The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (PJMF) is a philanthropic organization dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence and data science solutions to create a thriving, equitable, and sustainable future for all. PJMF works in partnership with public, private, and social institutions to drive progress on our most pressing challenges, including digital health, climate change, broad digital access, and data maturity in the social sector.

PJMF is building a suite of AI-enabled tools that will serve as the intelligence layer for modern philanthropy. Every year, foundations and corporate funders deploy hundreds of billions of dollars toward humanity's most pressing challenges—yet they do so using systems designed for compliance, not insight. Program officers spend more time reformatting documents and reconciling spreadsheets than learning from their portfolios or deepening relationships with grant partners. Grant Guardian, PJMF's existing product, already helps hundreds of foundations use AI to streamline their financial due diligence workflows. The next step is a product that will place AI at the center of strategic philanthropy by automatically distilling grant applications into actionable insights, identifying patterns across thousands of grants, generating board materials in minutes, and lowering barriers for historically excluded organizations through features like proposal feedback and translation.

About the Role

We are seeking a self-driven Junior DevOps Engineer to contribute to the development, deployment, and maintenance of data and AI products that support positive social impact around the world. You will support the maintenance of the cloud infrastructure that powers our AI and data products, while contributing to the full-stack applications built on top of it. You will also work directly with nonprofit partners, helping them understand and adopt the tools we build.

We are a small team. We work in short cycles and collaborate across disciplines. In this role, you will contribute directly to cloud-based applications that bring AI outputs into real use.

This is an early-career, growth-oriented DevOps role designed for engineers who are building foundational experience in cloud infrastructure, automation, and deployment systems. The role operates under the guidance of senior engineers and progressively assumes greater responsibility as skills and confidence develop.

How You'll Make An Impact

• Cloud infrastructure and operations. Maintain and improve our AWS environments using infrastructure-as-code. This includes VPC configuration, IAM policies, secrets management, logging, backups, and cost controls.

• Application development. Write frontend and backend production code for shared platform services and internal tooling. Our stack includes primarily Go, Python, JavaScript, and React.

• CI/CD and automation. Contribute to deployment pipelines using GitHub Actions. Automate testing, container builds, releases, and operational workflows like environment provisioning and dependency updates.

• Containerization and platform support. Support our Docker-based deployment platform, including build workflows, deployment strategies, and autoscaling.

• Observability and incident response. Implement and maintain metrics, centralized logging, alerting, and dashboards. Participate in incident response under the direction of senior engineers.

• Developer experience. Build and maintain internal documentation, service templates, and local development tooling that help the team move faster and debug with confidence.

• Partner collaboration. Work directly with nonprofit partners to support their adoption of our tools. You will translate technical concepts clearly, listen to how partners experience what we build, and bring that feedback into the product cycle. This is recurring, meaningful work, not occasional.

• Participate in stretch assignments and special projects in service of our broader strategic priorities.

What You Need To Be Successful

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field is preferred. Equivalent practical experience may be considered; however, candidates with formal academic training in software or infrastructure-related disciplines are strongly encouraged.
• Development Experience: 1-3 years of experience in a DevOps, infrastructure, or full-stack engineering role.
• Programming: Working proficiency in Python or Go is strongly preferred. Experience contributing to production codebases is preferred.
• Cloud experience: Hands-on experience deploying or supporting production systems on AWS or a comparable cloud platform.
• Pipeline experience: Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using modern tooling (e.g., GitHub Actions, etc), source control (GitHub), issue tracking (Jira) and best practices.
• Infrastructure: Familiarity with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) is required. Exposure to containerization tools (e.g., Docker) and Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform) is also expected.
• Team Collaboration & Communication: Ability to work effectively in a small, virtual, fast-moving team. Communicate clearly in writing and conversation, document work thoughtfully, and demonstrate growing technical judgment when balancing short-term delivery needs with longer-term system considerations.
• Work eligibility: Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. (No visa sponsorship available)

Exposure We Value:

• Observability experience: Exposure to monitoring, logging, and alerting systems and participating in incident response or on-call rotations.

• Systems Fundamentals: Basic understanding of networking, system reliability, and security fundamentals.

• Security Fundamentals: Awareness of basic security best practices and an interest in learning how infrastructure security is maintained.

• Cloud cost & sustainability: Interest in learning how teams monitor infrastructure costs and system efficiency.

What We Offer:

We anticipate the starting salary range for this role to be $70,000 - $106,000. Beyond career-defining work, we offer a comprehensive benefits package to support you along the way:

• Health Coverage – We offer Foundation-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their spouses or domestic partners and dependents. In addition, we provide HSA/FSA plans, life insurance, and short- and long-term disability coverage.

• Long-term Rewards – Our 401(k) retirement plan includes generous matching of up to 6% of annual pay, plus an additional discretionary match at the end of the year.

• Flexible PTO – We offer unlimited paid time off, which allows team members to take the time they need for vacation or illness so they can return to work able to contribute fully to our mission. In addition, the Foundation recognizes 11 paid national holidays per year and may also announce closure for local, regional, or state holidays.

• Remote Work Environment - Employees work 100% remotely–but not alone–alongside a community of mature, socially minded professionals. We provide a monthly work support stipend to offset the costs of phone, internet, or co-working space.

• Wellness Support – In addition to our health coverage, we offer access to Ginger, Gympass, Headspace, and SmartSpend Plus, along with financial well-being service providers.

• Parental Leave – We provide up to 6 months of gender-neutral paid leave for parents and caregivers when they have a new addition to their families.

• Learning Reimbursements – We encourage team members to explore development opportunities such as peer learning, internal training, and external activities.

• Philanthropic Gift Matching – We support our team members' personal investments in social impact by matching eligible charitable donations 1:1 up to $1,000 per calendar year.

$70,000 - $106,000 a year

Salary Philosophy: PJMF is committed to fair and transparent compensation practices. Our salary ranges are informed by market data from peer organizations in our sector. Our salaries are competitive and equitable and align with peers in the same job group. Because salary ranges are small and the internal parity review is thorough, offers are firm.

Starting salaries are typically placed in the lower half of the range. Final offers are determined by the scope of the position, the candidate's relevant experience, and internal equity.

The attributes listed above represent our current thinking for