SUMMARY: National Heritage Academies (NHA) is a charter management organization overseeing over 100 schools across nine states. Our in-house Student Information System (SIS) is a mission-critical web application that supports academic and administrative operations. We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer - DevOps & System Reliability to be responsible for software development, system performance, infrastructure automation, and deployment pipelines in addition to leading and coaching a small team of full stack software engineers. As the Lead Software Engineer for DevOps & System Reliability, you will oversee system performance, automation, and infrastructure management. These responsibilities will include DevOps pipelines, system monitoring, and deployment strategies to ensure high performance, high availability, and system health. This role requires a balance of leadership, technical expertise, and strategic vision to drive reliability, scalability, and continuous improvement across the SIS platform. COMPANY INFORMATION: National Heritage Academies (NHA) partners with communities to build and operate public charter schools. Founded in 1995, today NHA serves over 100 schools in nine states, with more than 65,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Our schools are designed to eliminate the achievement gap and provide school choice to families so their children are prepared for success in college, career, and life. A majority of our schools consistently outperform their local district on the state test. According to the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, NHA is a leading performer among charter schools and management organizations, outperforming both conventional district schools and other charter school operators. In addition, according to our employee survey, over 90% of respondents agree that the work they do is meaningful to them. Join our team. DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Leadership & Strategy: Lead and mentor a team of three full stack engineers, fostering collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement. Define and promote DevOps, CI/CD, and system reliability best practices aligned with product goals. Champion SRE principles to balance reliability, scalability, and delivery speed across the platform. System Reliability & Performance: Lead the observability strategy using Elastic Stack to monitor and optimize system performance. Define incident response protocols, conduct root cause analyses, and reduce recurring issues. Enhance logging, alerting, and health checks to improve platform reliability. DevOps & Infrastructure Automation: Manage containerized infrastructure using Docker and infrastructure as code principles to support scalability. Implement resilient deployment strategies, including rollback and zero-downtime releases. Own and optimize CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps to enable fast, automated deployments. Product Development & Engineering: Contribute to product feature development as a full-stack engineer. Participate in Agile ceremonies (e.g., sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospectives). Collaborate with product managers and designers to align technical solutions with user needs and priorities. Review and contribute to code in the team's primary tech stack (e.g., .NET, Angular, SQL Server). Identify opportunities to improve technical design, address tech debt, and enhance maintainability. Security & Compliance: Work closely with security teams to implement secure authentication (Okta, JWT) and ensure compliance with industry standards. Enforce best practices in access control, infrastructure security, and data protection. Technical Mentorship & Growth: Provide technical guidance, code reviews, and mentorship to team members. Conduct knowledge-sharing sessions to upskill the team on system reliability and DevOps methodologies. Foster a collaborative and learning-oriented team environment. QUALIFICATIONS: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience. 2+ years in a Senior Engineering role, leadership, or mentorship capacity overseeing technical individuals. Experience in large-scale enterprise applications with high-availability architectures. Proficiency and/or experience with .NET, C#, SQL, HTML, Angular.JS, Angular, CSS and SPA application structure. Strong background in CI/CD, infrastructure automation, and monitoring. Agile-based software development team experience using SCRUM or similar methodologies. Experience with identity frameworks and protocols. This is an in-person position at our NHA Service Center located at 3850 Broadmoor Ave., Grand Rapids, MI. Please click here to learn more about our core values. National Heritage Academies is an equal opportunity employer.