DevOps Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer

Overview

Founded in 1921, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is a leading nonprofit membership organization, research center, and publisher, with headquarters in New York, an office in Washington, DC, and programs nationwide. It is dedicated to increasing America's understanding of the world and contributing ideas to U.S. foreign policy. CFR’s 5,000+ members are leaders in international affairs and foreign policy. CFR also publishes Foreign Affairs, the preeminent magazine on global issues, and provides up-to-date information about the world and U.S. foreign policy on its award-winning website, CFR.org.

Position Summary

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is seeking an experienced DevOps engineer / Site Reliability Engineer. This role is responsible for maintaining the secure and reliable functioning of our digital properties including CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, Think Global Health, The China Open Source Observatory, and other associated web and mobile sites. The portfolio spans a managed WordPress VIP publishing platform, Pantheon publishing platform, and custom AWS applications.  

This role owns the reliability, resilience, security, and observability of those properties, the delivery pipeline that ships to them, and a growing set of AI and agentic services built on top of them. Your goal is to prevent outages; when incidents happen, you lead the response and make sure we learn from them. You will work closely with the software engineering team and report to the associate vice president of product, design, and engineering.

This full-time position is based in CFR’s New York City or Washington D.C. office on a hybrid basis. CFR currently defines hybrid status as working at least four days a week onsite, with Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays considered institutional anchor days where all staff are required to be onsite. 

Essential Functions/Responsibilities

• Define and track SLOs and error budgets for each property. Own on-call, incident response, root cause analysis, and blameless postmortems. 

• Run observability, logging, and alerting systems (Datadog, Dash0) to track service health, improve resilience, and prevent downtime, and raise issues before visitors or stakeholders ever see a problem. 

• Own infrastructure, backup, and disaster recovery documentation and execution. 

• Maintain the CI/CD pipelines for CFR.org and our applications, including WordPress VIP and Pantheon deploys as well as custom AWS apps; debug failed runs and keep configurations current. 

• Provision and manage AWS infrastructure as code with Terraform, with policy checks and drift detection in the pipeline. 

• Identify opportunities to use automation, testing, and deployments. 

• Build security into every stage of delivery: manage Okta-based role-based access, own secrets, key management and rotation. 

• Own infrastructure, backup, and disaster recovery documentation and execution. 

• Own AWS security posture and edge/WAF configuration.  

• Lead incident response, determine root cause on production issues, mitigate, and provide technical support to the engineering team as needed. 

• Assist DevSecOps contractors, vendors, and cross-functional technical contributors to deliver against the platform roadmap 

Minimum Qualifications

Experience

• 3-7 years experience in DevOps, SRE, platform or security engineering.  

• Proven experience with AWS and infrastructure as code with Terraform.  

• Experience with managed platforms such as WordPress VIP, Pantheon, Acquia, or similar. 

• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with automated testing and multi-environment deployments. Familiarity with supply-chain security tooling.  

• Hands-on experience applying zero-trust principles. SSO/MFA through an identity provider (Okta), least-privilege IAM, short-lived credentials, and secrets management (1password, AWS Secrets Manager or similar). 

• Scripting in Bash and Python. Working familiarity with PHP and Node.js/TypeScript. Working knowledge of WAF/CDN services such as Cloudflare, Cloudfront, or, Fastly. 

• Strong communication and problem solving skills, serving as a collaborative bridge across engineering, operations, IT, and vendors.  

Required Application Materials

Please submit a résumé and cover letter stating your interest in the position.

Compensation and Benefits

• The full-time annual compensation range for this position is $150,000 – $175,000, depending on experience.
• In addition to competitive salaries, the Council on Foreign Relations offers a benefits package that is among the best offered by nonprofit institutions today, including an award-winning health and wellness program, an on-site fitness center, and generous leave policies and health insurance programs.

About CFR

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is committed to fostering a foreign policy community in the United States that is more representative of American society, recognizing that diverse backgrounds and perspectives contribute to broader, more informed participation in the foreign policy debate and lead to an enhanced understanding of the world and the United States’ role therein. To that end, CFR is dedicated to continuing to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout its work and workplace by building a more diverse membership and staff, producing and dispensing thoughtful analysis on a broad range of foreign policy issues, and developing relevant, wide-reaching programming that also serves to expand the foreign policy talent pipeline to underrepresented populations.