Principal DevOps Architect
“Be part of a company that is influential and the standard for a rapidly evolving industry!”
WHO ARE WE?
RealTime eClinical Solutions is a Global Leader and rapidly growing SaaS technology company that provides comprehensive Software Solutions to the clinical research industry.
Our Vision is to reshape the global clinical research industry with innovative solutions that help advance medicine and save lives. Our cloud-based solutions are dedicated to solving complex problems and simplifying clinical research processes to be more organized, efficient, and cost-effective. We are based out of San Antonio, TX but are truly a remote and telecommuting company.
WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
The Principal DevOps Architect is the senior technical authority for the cloud platform that runs RealTime’s global, multi-tenant clinical-trial services, and drives RealTime’s adoption of infrastructure as code and AI tooling. This is a hands-on individual-contributor architect role rather than a people-management role: you design the platform architecture, set the standards and reference implementations other teams build on, and still write Terraform, build pipelines, and stand up the AI platform yourself. You define how reliability is measured against SLOs, how releases ship, and how the AI/ML platform is built and governed, and you keep the environment HIPAA-compliant and SOC 2 Type 2 audit-ready. You influence products, software, and QA through architecture and example rather than direct authority.
WHAT WILL YOU BE DOING?
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Own the platform architecture and technical roadmap for infrastructure, deployment, observability, and the AI platform, and advise the VP of Software Architecture and engineering leadership.
- Set the engineering standards, patterns, and golden paths for infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and AI tooling, and drive their adoption through reference implementations and architecture reviews.
- Act as hands-on technical authority and mentor to engineers across teams, leading by example in code, infrastructure, and incident response, without direct management responsibility.
- Drive RealTime’s move to infrastructure as code and AI tooling and prevent uncontrolled spread of unvetted AI tools.
- Recommend build/buy decisions for platform tooling and evaluate vendors, with final decisions owned by the VP and CTO.
Infrastructure as Code & Cloud Platform
- Manage all cloud infrastructure as code in Terraform as the single source of truth: reusable modules, remote state, peer-reviewed infrastructure pull requests, drift detection, and automated plan/apply in CI/CD.
- Enforce policy-as-code (for example, OPA or Sentinel) so infrastructure changes meet security and cost guardrails before they merge, with separation between the author and approver of a change.
- Design and deploy AWS infrastructure for performance, availability, recoverability, and security across development, UAT, staging, and production, meeting the CIS Critical Security Controls.
- Maintain and improve the multi-tenant database and hosting architecture in a cloud-hosted environment, including replication and per-tenant isolation.
CI/CD & Release Engineering
- Build and operate CI/CD pipelines for large-scale applications on AWS using GitHub Actions or equivalent, with automated build, test, and deployment.
- Own release management and rollback: safe deployment strategies (blue/green, canary), fast and reliable rollbacks, and release gates for QA and customer acceptance.
- Package and run containerized workloads on Docker and Kubernetes (EKS), and automate configuration with tools such as Ansible and Packer.
Reliability & Observability
- Lead the SLI/SLO/SLA program and manage error budgets to balance reliability against delivery speed.
- Operate modern observability using cloud-native tooling and OpenTelemetry (metrics, logs, and distributed traces) to drive down MTTD and MTTR.
- Analyze production events to impr