Delphi Developer Contract Jobs in Illinois (NOW HIRING)

Platform Engineer | Location: Chicago, IL | Contract
Our client is seeking a skilled Platform Engineer to join a long-term contract focused on developing and managing a cutting-edge R&D sandbox environment. This role involves building and maintaining cloud infrastructure, implementing self-service provisioning, and ensuring cloud governance across AWS and Azure platforms. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in cloud infrastructure, automation, and container orchestration, supporting innovative experimentation and development initiatives.
Key Responsibilities

• Design, extend, and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) patterns using Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Ansible for both AWS and Azure environments.
• Operate and enhance the sandbox management plane, including configuring EKS clusters, GitLab CI/CD runners, ArgoCD deployments, Vault PKI, Traefik ingress, and AWS CodePipeline.
• Resolve billing and governance issues related to Azure/Entra, aligning Azure with the unified governance model used for AWS.
• Maintain resource tagging compliance, cost visibility, and lifecycle controls across cloud providers, ensuring adherence to cost thresholds.
• Build and populate the Architecture Pattern Catalog with approved IaC patterns to enable users to provision sandbox environments independently.
• Implement a self-service cloud catalog that allows users to provision compute resources efficiently within the sandbox environment.
• Validate deployment time SLAs, ensuring environments are provisioned within targeted timeframes, such as 1 hour or 1 day, to facilitate frictionless user experiences.
• Contribute to the development of developer environment patterns to expand sandbox usability beyond infrastructure-only experiments.
• Operationalize the git persistence model by deploying IaC patterns from approved repositories, ensuring reproducibility and supporting redeploy workflows.
• Support integration with GitHub Actions and broader GitOps pipelines for experiment execution.
• Document environment architecture, usage patterns, and workflows in the work management platform and experiment repositories.

Required Qualifications

• 3-5+ years of experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Ansible for provisioning cloud resources.
• Proven experience with cloud-native container orchestration, specifically Kubernetes (EKS preferred), including cluster management and workload deployment.
• Strong background in CI/CD pipeline development using tools like GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps Pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with GitOps delivery patterns using ArgoCD or similar tools, managing declarative application states from git repositories.
• Proficiency in secrets management and PKI, including HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS, and Secrets Manager.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, and AWS CloudWatch/CloudTrail.
• Working knowledge of enterprise networking components, including ingress controllers (Traefik or equivalent), load balancers, security groups, and certificate-based authentication.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted developer tooling, such as GitHub Copilot, within CI/CD environments.
• Strong UNIX/Linux fundamentals and comfort operating in terminal-first infrastructure environments.
• Ability to work autonomously from a planned work management tool (e.g., Jira) against a defined delivery roadmap.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Rancher-k8s or similar Kubernetes distributions.
• Knowledge of enterprise networking security practices and load balancing.
• Prior experience supporting cloud governance and cost management initiatives.
• Familiarity with cloud billing and cost optimization strategies.
• Experience working in a research and development or experimental environment.

About Delphi-US - Peacemakers in the Talent War
Delphi-US is a national IT Services firm based in Newport, Rhode Island. Delphi attracts our nation's best and brightest Technical & Professional Talent and positions our nation's finest employers to further their competitive advantages. Delphi's core technical focus includes Data Intelligence Engineering & Analytics, AI/ML Operational Excellence, DevOps & Cloud Computing, Health IT & Life Sciences, and Energy Management/Power Systems; serving domains from sensitive national energy sectors to critical financial services, biomed, life sciences & pharma, major government & municipal institutions, and much of the USA's Fortune 500 corporations. Delphi Associates are deployed on critical IT Projects where their consultative business acumen, comprehensive technical expertise, and committed service mission drives our client's success. Our proprietary skill-based and cultural matching process results in higher qualified project teams, custom curated for our client's specific technical & functional goals. We are supremely experienced, friendly, professional, and ready to advocate on your behalf. Delphi has an indelible understanding of employer expectations, a track record of project success and we deliver lasting results.
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