Systems Engineer Contract Jobs in Chicago, IL (NOW HIRING)

At Early Warning, we've powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle, Paze, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose

This position is an important role in the development, test, and deployment of complex solutions.

Essential Functions

• Build technical strategy for broad or complex requirements with insightful and forward-looking approaches that go beyond the direct team and solve large open-ended problems.

• Participate in the strategic development of methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria for projects and programs.

• Drive all aspects of technical architecture, design, prototyping and implementation in support of both product needs as well as overall technology strategy.

• Provide leadership and technical expertise in support of building a technical plan and backlog of stories, and then follow through on execution of design and build process through to production delivery.

• Guide a broad functional area and lead efforts through the functional team members along with the team's overall planning.

• Represent engineering in cross-functional team sessions and able to present sound and thoughtful arguments to persuade others. Adapts to the situation and can draw from a range of strategies to influence people in a way that results in agreement or behavior change.

• Collaborate and partner with product managers, designers, and other engineering groups to conceptualize and build new features and create product descriptions.

• Actively own features or systems and define their long-term health, while also improving the health of surrounding systems.

• Assist support and operations teams in identifying and quickly resolving production issues.

• Develop and implement tests for ensuring the quality, performance, and scalability of our application.

• Actively seek out ways to improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes.

• Supporting the company's commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

For Cloud Focus Only:

• Lead infrastructure-as-code projects, designing APIs and building tools to be used by engineering teams for reliable and repeatable cloud deployments
• Implement abstractions to simplify the complexities of cloud providers (AWS), open-source technologies (Kubernetes), and internal EWS infrastructure
• Obsess about the usability of the systems you build, allowing engineers to have an intuitive and predictable experience working with infrastructure at scale
• Troubleshooting complex infrastructure problems, often spanning multiple layers of the stack and requires working with multiple teams
• Experience designing cloud infrastructure for robustness, security, and observability
• Expertise in infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and continuous deployment pipelines
• Expertise in AWS foundations including compute, networking, storage, observability and security. Experience in automating AWS services using Terraform and Ansible. Experience in highly scalable distributed datacenter or cloud computer systems (AWS, Azure, VM)
• Strong knowledge of AWS services (EC2, IAM, ELB, Route53, S3, Lambda, Cloud Formation, DynamoDB)
• Experience architecting Kubernetes based systems
• Container orchestration - Kubernetes, TKGi, EKS, ECS
• Proficient with using and debugging networks, DNS, HTTP, TLS, load-balancing, build systems, Linux, and Docker
• Experience in building CI/CD pipelines
• Experience building and scaling Workflow pipelines
• Experience in data center operations, monitoring, alerting and notifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Education and/or experience typically obtained through a Bachelor's degree in computer science or related technical field.

• Eight or more years of relevant related experience

• Seven or more years of experience in the development of distributed systems, SaaS, cloud solutions, micro services.

• Hands-on Docker experience.

• Two or more years of experience in the development of front-end solutions. Hands-on familiarity with modern frameworks (Angular/React)

• Six or more years of work experience with Java/Spring. Proficiency in Maven/Gradle.

• Demonstrated experience in delivering business-critical systems to the market.

• Ability to influence and work in a collaborative team environment.

• Experience designing/developing scalable systems.

• Experience with event-driven architecture and messaging frameworks (Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc).

• Working experience with cloud infrastructure (Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Azure, etc).

• Knowledge of mature engineering practices (CI/CD, testing, secure coding, etc).

• Knowledge of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) best practices, software development methodologies (Agile, Scrum, LEAN etc) and DevOps practices.

• Background and drug screen.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PHD

• JavaScript and scripting frameworks experience (JQuery, AngularJS)

• Monitoring and Alerting systems experience (AppDynamics)

• Computer language experience (C#, Ruby, Python, and PHP)

• Knowledge of ACH/EFT

• Knowledge of real time payment networks (RTP, FedNow)

• FinTech experience

• Kubernetes experience

• AWS, Azure (and/or other cloud-based) certification(s) strongly preferred

Physical Requirements

Working conditions consist of a normal office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Work may require occasional standing, walking, kneeling and reaching. Must be able to lift 10 pounds occasionally and/or negligible amount of force frequently. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers.

Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States at the date of hire.

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position.

Early Warning Services, LLC ("Early Warning") considers for employment, hires, retains and promotes qualified candidates on the basis of ability, potential, and valid qualifications without regard to race, religious creed, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, protected veteran or disability status or any factor prohibited by law, and as such affirms in policy and practice to support and promote equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and municipal laws. The company also prohibits discrimination on other bases such as medical condition, marital status or any other factor that is irrelevant to the performance of our employees.

Early Warning Services LLC is a proud participant in E-Verify, a federal program to help ensure a legal and authorized workforce. As part of our hiring process, we electronically verify the employment eligibility of all new hires through E-Verify. For more information on your rights and responsibilities under E-Verify please visit Home | E-Verify.