Contract Developer Operations Jobs in Missoula, MT

ELM Utility Services, is a team of over 1900 employees nationwide. We are seeking a highly experienced DevOps Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with strong ownership, systems thinking, automation, and leadership through influence. DevOps Engineer IVs are trusted technical leaders responsible for improving engineering platforms and delivery practices, reducing operational friction, increasing system reliability, and helping teams adopt consistent and sustainable engineering standards. As a DevOps Engineer at ELM, you will help shape the platforms, tooling, automation, and engineering practices that allow our software teams to deliver reliable systems safely and efficiently. This role sits at the intersection of software development, cloud infrastructure, security, observability, and operations. You will help establish scalable approaches to building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and supporting software across the organization. At ELM, our mission is important - helping keep our communities safe by reducing accidents involving underground utility infrastructure. Our engineering teams design, build, and operate enterprise-class software that powers critical operational and corporate workflows across the organization. Starting wages for this position will be $100,000-$130,000 depending on experience.

Our Total Rewards Package Includes:

• Optional benefits like Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, Disability, FSA, H.S.A., and Teladoc.
• Company Paid Life Insurance
• Paid-Time Off (PTO) for vacation and sick time
  
• 6 Paid Holidays
• 401(k) plan
• Bonuses for milestone anniversaries
• Competitive pay based on experience
• Long history of stable employment and promoting from within
• Opportunity to lead and modernize production systems with meaningful operational impact 

Roles & Responsibilities: 

• Lead large-scale DevOps, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, and automation initiatives from design through implementation and operational support.
• Design, implement, and maintain reliable CI/CD pipelines that provide consistent, repeatable, and auditable software delivery across environments.
• Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code and automated configuration practices for cloud infrastructure and application environments.
• Improve deployment strategies, release management, environment consistency, rollback capabilities, and production change safety.
• Partner with software engineering teams to improve build, test, deployment, and development workflows while reducing unnecessary manual processes.
• Design and support scalable Azure cloud infrastructure, including application hosting, networking, identity, secrets management, storage, databases, and supporting platform services.
• Establish and improve observability practices using logging, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
• Help define and implement standards for application and infrastructure monitoring, production readiness, operational health, and service reliability.
• Support incident response, troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement activities for production systems.
• Identify recurring operational issues and replace manual remediation with automation wherever practical.
• Champion engineering practices around security, resiliency, scalability, performance, compliance, maintainability, and operational excellence.
• Work closely with software engineers to design systems that are deployable, observable, supportable, and resilient in production.
• Improve automated testing integration within CI/CD pipelines, including unit, integration, contract, security, and end-to-end testing where appropriate.
• Support cloud identity and access management, service principals, managed identities, role-based access control, secrets management, and secure service-to-service communication.
• Participate in technical design reviews and help ensure new systems include appropriate deployment, infrastructure, monitoring, security, and operational considerations.
• Establish reusable engineering patterns, templates, tooling, and platform capabilities that can be adopted consistently across development teams.
• Mentor engineers in DevOps, cloud, CI/CD, observability, reliability, and operational engineering practices.
• Evaluate new technologies and tools and help guide pragmatic modernization of ELM's engineering platform.
• Translate complex infrastructure and operational concepts into clear communication for technical and non-technical audiences.
• Promote a culture of ownership, automation, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Education and Experience

• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of professional experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Software Engineering, or related disciplines.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating production cloud infrastructure and software delivery platforms.
• Strong experience with Microsoft Azure and common Azure application and infrastructure services.
• Advanced experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or comparable platforms.
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code technologies such as Bicep, Terraform, ARM templates, or equivalent tooling.
• Strong understanding of Git-based development workflows, branching strategies, pull requests, artifact management, and automated release processes.
• Experience with scripting and automation using PowerShell, Bash, Python, C#, or similar languages.
• Strong understanding of cloud networking, identity, authentication, authorization, secrets management, and security principles.
• Experience with containerization technologies such as Docker and modern container hosting or orchestration platforms.
• Strong experience with observability platforms and practices, including centralized logging, metrics, application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
• Experience troubleshooting distributed applications and production systems across application, infrastructure, networking, and database layers.
• Working knowledge of relational databases and SQL Server.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, APIs, asynchronous processing, resiliency, scalability, and performance.
• Experience supporting production systems and participating in incident response and root cause analysis.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum product delivery environments.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and organizational skills.
• Strong analytical thinking and problem-solving abilities.
• Ability to influence technical direction and engineering practices without direct authority.
• Demonstrated ability to identify systemic problems and implement solutions that improve engineering productivity and reliability across multiple teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related field.
• Deep experience with Azure DevOps, including Repos, Pipelines, service connections, environments, variable management, permissions, and deployment controls.
• Experience with Azure Entra ID, managed identities, RBAC, workload identity federation, and enterprise identity management.
• Experience with Azure App Service, Functions, Container Apps, SQL Database, Storage Accounts, Key Vault, App Configuration, Service Bus, and related Azure services.
• Experience with Datadog, Azure Monitor, Application Insights, or comparable observability platforms.
• Experience implementing automated security scanning, dependency scanning, static analysis, infrastructure validation, and other DevSecOps practices within delivery pipelines.
• Experience defining and measuring engineering reliability and delivery metrics such as deployment frequency, change failure rate, lead time, recovery time, service-level indicators, and service-level objectives.
• Experience designing standardized deployment pipelines and reusable CI/CD templates across multiple applications and teams.
• Experience implementing blue/green, canary, staged, or other controlled deployment strategies.
• Experience supporting .NET and C# application environments.
• Familiarity with SQL Server performance, deployment, and operational practices.
• Experience operating within regulated, audited, or compliance-driven environments.
• Experience leading cloud modernization, platform engineering, or DevOps transformation initiatives.

WE ARE AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER