DevOps Engineer

Location: Palo Alto, CA (HQ)

Travel: This position involves both domestic (CONUS) and international (OCONUS) travel at roughly 15%

We are building technology for national security and defense missions at the highest levels of government and decision-making. Our software helps bring together complex data, systems, and workflows to support critical decisions across the national-security enterprise. As our platform scales, our technology must operate reliably across cloud, on-premises, and distributed environments.

We are looking for a hands-on DevOps Engineer to help make that possible. This is an opportunity for an ambitious engineer with strong technical foundations who wants to take meaningful ownership, solve challenging problems, and grow quickly in a high-impact environment.

You will own the systems that take our software from a developer’s laptop all the way into production—and increasingly into distributed customer and edge environments. You will work across cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, containers, Kubernetes, observability, automation, security, and edge deployment to make our software easier to build, deploy, operate, and scale.

This is an end-to-end ownership role. You won't be limited to a narrow infrastructure function or handed fully defined requirements. You will help identify problems, determine the right approach, build the solution, deploy it, operate it, and continuously improve it. When something breaks, you will be expected to understand the problem, work across layers of the stack, and drive it through to resolution.

We are looking for someone who already has strong technical fundamentals, is naturally curious, learns quickly, and wants to take on increasingly difficult problems. You should be excited by the opportunity to grow your scope rather than waiting for someone else to define it.

Because we operate in defense environments, our deployments can be very different from a typical SaaS environment. You may work with cloud infrastructure one day and help deploy software into a disconnected, bandwidth-constrained, resource-constrained, or otherwise challenging environment the next. You will work directly with software engineers, technical leadership, customers, and field teams to make those deployments successful. 

What You'll Own

• Own the end-to-end deployment lifecycle—from source control, builds, and testing through production and edge deployment, monitoring, upgrades, recovery, and ongoing operations.
• Build and improve CI/CD systems that allow engineering teams to build, test, package, and release software quickly and reliably.
• Design and automate deployments across cloud, on-premises, and distributed edge environments, including environments with limited connectivity, constrained resources, or other operational challenges.
• Build and maintain infrastructure as code, creating repeatable, version-controlled environments that can be deployed consistently across cloud and edge locations.
• Deploy and operate containerized applications using Docker, Kubernetes, and related technologies, including configuration, upgrades, troubleshooting, and lifecycle management.
• Create the tooling engineers need to move faster. Identify repetitive or fragile processes and turn them into reliable automation.
• Build operational capabilities for configuration management, application lifecycle management, observability, logging, health monitoring, and fleet management across distributed environments.
• Own reliable release and recovery mechanisms, including deployment validation, rollbacks, upgrades, failure recovery, and disaster recovery.
• Partner closely with software engineers to improve application architecture, deployment patterns, developer workflows, testability, and operational reliability.
• Troubleshoot problems across the full stack. Investigate issues spanning applications, containers, Kubernetes, Linux, networking, infrastructure, and deployment systems—and drive them to resolution.
• Help build secure-by-default infrastructure and delivery practices, including appropriate access controls, vulnerability management, secrets management, and secure software delivery, while maintaining engineering velocity.
• Support production systems and deployments, including participation in an on-call rotation for critical systems as the team and customer footprint grows.
• Help shape the deployment architecture as we scale, evolving our platform from early-stage product development toward operating software reliably across a growing distributed customer and edge footprint.
• Get close to the real-world mission. Travel 15–20% CONUS and OCONUS to support deployments, field operations, customer environments, and system integration activities.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years of professional experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Strong technical foundations in Linux, networking, systems, and software development workflows.
• Hands-on experience building and operating CI/CD pipelines, preferably including taking them from an initial implementation to a reliable production system.
• Practical experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and containerized application deployment.
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, such as Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience with Git-based development workflows and platforms such as GitHub or GitLab.
• Proficiency in Python, Bash, or another programming language used to automate infrastructure and operational workflows.
• Experience implementing automated testing, deployment validation, monitoring, and rollback processes.
• A solid understanding of networking, APIs, system configuration, and distributed systems.
• The ability to diagnose problems across application, infrastructure, networking, and deployment layers rather than treating each as an isolated domain.
• Working knowledge of practical software and infrastructure security, including identity and access management, vulnerability management, secrets, and secure configuration.
• Experience deploying software in distributed, on-premises, or edge environments is highly desirable, but not required.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with software engineers, technical leadership, customers, and field teams.
• Curiosity and a strong learning mindset. You don't need to know everything; you need to be willing and able to figure things out.
• A bias toward ownership. You naturally ask, "What needs to happen to make this work?" rather than "What part of this was assigned to me?"
• Comfort operating in a fast-paced startup environment where requirements change, problems are sometimes ambiguous, and you may need to define the problem, build the solution, deploy it, and own the outcome.
• Willingness and ability to travel, roughly 15% CONUS and OCONUS

What We Value

We care less about whether you've worked with every technology on our stack and more about how you approach problems.

The right person for this role:

• Has strong engineering fundamentals and is eager to keep building on them.
• Takes responsibility for outcomes, not just tasks.
• Can move between the details and the bigger picture.
• Is comfortable saying, "I don't know yet," and then figuring it out.
• Enjoys building rather than simply maintaining.
• Looks for ways to automate, simplify, and make systems more reliable.
• Wants to understand how software behaves in the real world, not just how it works in a development environment.
• Is energized by difficult deployment environments and problems that don't have an obvious playbook.
• Wants their responsibilities and impact to grow as they demonstrate capability.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means engineering can move quickly without being held back by deployment and operational complexity.

Software moves predictably from development to production. Deployments are repeatable rather than bespoke. Cloud and edge environments can be provisioned and updated through automation. Failures are observable, diagnosable, and recoverable. Engineers can understand the health of their systems without needing to become infrastructure experts.

You will have significant ownership over how we build, deploy, and operate our software, and your scope will grow as you demonstrate that you can take on more. This is a role for someone who is ready to go beyond their current experience—not because they already know everything, but because they are ambitious, technically capable, and eager to learn.

Salary Range

• The estimated base salary range for this position is $100,000/year to $120,000/year

Benefits 

• Full medical, dental, vision coverage for employee and dependents 
• 401k matching program 
• PTO and Holidays 
• Bonus and other incentive programs
• Access to mental health program
• Access to Flexible Spending Accounts for Health Care, Dependent and Commuter

About Rhombus 

Rhombus Power Inc. (Rhombus) is a startup located in the heart of Silicon Valley at Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto.  We use cutting-edge cross-disciplinary approaches to solve pressing Big Data and Sensing problems in security, energy, and healthcare. Our advisory board includes two Nobel Laureates and a Draper Prize winner. 

Rhombus compensates, motivates, and develops employees, who are trusted, empowered, and involved. Employees have clear roles and expectations – and their roles are flexible enough to move at the speed of innovation in order to meet and exceed client expectations. We have a unique culture of global purpose, rooted in the innovation and progress of Silicon Valley.

Rhombus knows that diversity is a condition for success. We are committed to hiring and retaining a diverse workforce. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.