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United States
Remote only
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior/Staff DevOps Engineer, Federal based in United States.
We are seeking an experienced Senior/Staff DevOps Engineer to build, deploy, and maintain secure, reliable infrastructure supporting federal, government, and national security technology programs. In this role, you will lead complex infrastructure deployments across public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments, ensuring production systems meet demanding security and operational standards. You will work hands-on with Kubernetes, Docker, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and cloud technologies to deliver scalable and repeatable deployment solutions. Collaborating closely with software engineers, platform teams, security specialists, and external partners, you will translate technical and regulatory requirements into dependable infrastructure. You will also help strengthen deployment automation, improve system reliability, and establish reusable engineering practices across multiple environments. Depending on your experience, you will have opportunities to lead architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and shape the long-term infrastructure strategy for mission-critical AI applications.
Build and maintain infrastructure: Design, deploy, and operate secure, scalable environments across AWS, Azure, GCP, and customer-managed or on-premises infrastructure, adapting solutions to specific networking, access, and security requirements.
Manage containerized environments: Package, deploy, and validate applications and their dependencies using Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and approved container registries. Maintain version-controlled image inventories, release manifests, and deployment artifacts.
Develop infrastructure automation: Create reusable infrastructure-as-code modules, cluster bootstrap automation, and CI/CD or GitOps workflows using Terraform, Pulumi, Argo CD, or equivalent technologies.
Support secure deployments: Configure and validate networking, identity and access management (IAM), secrets, certificates, storage, container registries, and model-provider connectivity, including deployments in restricted or disconnected environments.
Improve platform portability: Identify and eliminate cloud-specific dependencies that prevent deployments across different infrastructure environments. Validate end-to-end application workflows, including integrations, authentication, model access, and persistent storage.
Own production troubleshooting: Lead technical investigations and resolve deployment, infrastructure, networking, Kubernetes, and application issues. Coordinate escalations with engineering teams and partners, ensuring solutions are validated before closing incidents.
Manage releases and upgrades: Deliver tested software releases, patches, and infrastructure upgrades through automated validation, compatibility checks, smoke tests, rollback procedures, and clear release documentation.
Strengthen observability and reliability: Implement and maintain monitoring, metrics, logs, traces, audit trails, dashboards, alerts, and service-level objectives (SLOs). Support incident response, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and continuous reliability improvements.
Implement security and compliance practices: Collaborate with security and governance teams on container hardening, vulnerability scanning, CVE remediation, software bills of materials (SBOMs), and technical evidence supporting applicable STIG, RMF/ATO, and government impact-level requirements.
Support federal infrastructure operations: Maintain and secure federal deployments through regular patching, image updates, configuration changes, and ongoing vulnerability remediation, including relevant government deployment platforms.
Maintain technical documentation: Develop deployment guides, infrastructure inventories, operational runbooks, troubleshooting procedures, and knowledge-transfer materials. Support partner onboarding and operational handovers with clearly defined responsibilities and access requirements.
Provide technical leadership: At Staff level, guide infrastructure architecture and reliability decisions across multiple environments, establish reusable engineering standards, mentor engineers, and reduce dependency on individual technical experts.
Coordinate cross-functional delivery: Work with technical program managers, product teams, engineering, security, and external partners to define requirements, validate acceptance criteria, estimate work, and identify risks and dependencies.
Drive continuous improvement: Identify recurring infrastructure and deployment challenges and transform them into reusable automation, standardized processes, and improvements to shared platform capabilities.
U.S. citizenship is mandatory for this position.
10+ years of professional experience in DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, or software engineering, including hands-on ownership of production systems.
Extensive practical experience with Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, and production-grade cluster operations.
Strong knowledge of Helm and infrastructure-as-code technologies such as Terraform or Pulumi, including reusable modules, state management, testing, and infrastructure change reviews.
Hands-on experience with at least two major cloud platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including compute, networking, storage, identity, and managed services.
Proven experience deploying and operating software in customer-controlled, private-cloud, hybrid-cloud, or on-premises environments.
Strong understanding of networking fundamentals and infrastructure components, including DNS, ingress, load balancing, certificates, IAM, secrets management, persistent storage, and service-to-service security.
Experience managing CI/CD pipelines or GitOps workflows for application releases, infrastructure upgrades, and rollback procedures.
Familiarity with observability tools, production monitoring, incident management, and operational reliability practices.
Strong programming and automation skills in Python, Go, TypeScript, or a comparable language, with the ability to work across both application and infrastructure layers.
Experience securing production infrastructure and container images, investigating vulnerabilities, implementing remediation measures, and validating security improvements.
Excellent troubleshooting, analytical, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to take ownership of technical issues from initial investigation through resolution and operational handover.
Strong communication and collaboration skills, particularly when working with external partners, engineering teams, and technical stakeholders.
Demonstrated experience using AI-assisted coding and engineering tools to improve development workflows, infrastructure automation, troubleshooting, operational analysis, or incident investigation.
Strongly Preferred Qualifications:
Previous DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering experience supporting national security, defense, federal agencies, or other government programs.
Active U.S. government security clearance.
Experience operating infrastructure in restricted-network, disconnected, regulated, or security-sensitive environments.
Practical knowledge of STIG hardening, NIST security controls, FedRAMP, RMF/ATO documentation, or Department of Defense Impact Levels IL4, IL5, and IL6.
Experience with government cloud environments, including AWS GovCloud, and federal deployment platforms such as Second Front/Game Warden.
Knowledge of software supply-chain security, SBOMs, artifact signing, FIPS-enabled components, Harbor, and policy-as-code practices.
Experience supporting stateful, data-intensive, AI/ML, or GPU-enabled workloads in production environments.
Previous customer-facing, partner engineering, or forward-deployed engineering experience, particularly involving multiple organizations and operational knowledge transfer.
Willingness and ability to travel up to approximately 20% as required for partner engagements, team collaboration, and customer deployments.
Competitive compensation: Annual base salary ranging from $180,000 to $240,000, depending on experience, qualifications, skills, and other relevant factors.
Additional compensation: Performance-based bonus opportunities and equity incentives.
Comprehensive healthcare: 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage for employees and their families.
Parental leave: 14 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave at normal salary.
Flexible time off: Unlimited paid time off, subject to management approval.
Retirement and financial benefits: Optional 401(k) retirement savings plan and flexible spending account (FSA).
Mental health support: Access to dedicated mental health and well-being services.
Professional development: Opportunities for continuous learning, skills development, and career advancement.
Career progression: Potential for rapid professional growth and increased responsibilities as the organization expands.
Flexible working arrangements: Remote opportunities across the United States, with Seattle, WA, and McLean, VA, preferred locations.
Technical impact: Opportunities to work on cutting-edge AI infrastructure and mission-critical technology supporting complex government and enterprise environments.
Travel opportunities: Occasional travel to headquarters or partner/customer locations may be required, potentially every 6–8 weeks.
