Senior DevOps Engineer

<div class="content-intro"><p><strong>This is a U.S. based position. All of the programs we support require </strong><strong>U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment. All work must be conducted within the continental U.S.</strong></p></div><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Who we are:</strong></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Raft (<a class="theme markdown__link" href="https://teamraft.com/" target="_blank">https://TeamRaft.com</a>) is a customer-obsessed non-traditional defense tech company dedicated to empowering U.S. military and government agencies with cutting-edge AI/ML and data solutions. We are a leader in autonomous data fusion and Agentic AI, with a purposeful focus on Distributed Data Systems, Platforms at Scale, and Complex Application Development. With headquarters in McLean, VA, our range of clients includes innovative federal and public agencies leveraging design thinking, cutting-edge tech stack, and cloud-native ecosystem. We build digital solutions that impact the lives of millions of Americans.</span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>About the role: </strong></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Raft builds mission-critical data, AI, and operational platforms that process high-volume sensor, operational, and mission data across multiple classification levels. These platforms must run reliably in cloud-hosted, classified on-premises, disconnected, and edge environments where security, repeatability, and customer trust are non-negotiable.</span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will own the secure delivery patterns behind [R]DP, [R]AP, [R]AIMS, and Raft’s MLOps deployments. You will design and harden Kubernetes-based platform architecture, improve GitOps and CI/CD workflows, automate compliance evidence, mentor engineers, and work directly with software, data, ML, security, and customer teams to keep mission systems deployable and trustworthy.</span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">This role requires more than infrastructure fluency. You should be comfortable reading application code, understanding data pipelines, debugging distributed systems, navigating regulated delivery constraints, and making pragmatic tradeoffs between security, delivery speed, operability, and mission urgency. You will shape the golden paths that teams use to deliver secure mission software: Helm and GitOps patterns, hardened runtime configuration, supply chain controls, observability, compliance automation, ML serving, and deployment practices across cloud and classified environments.</span></p> <h2><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">What You’ll Do</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Design, implement, and continuously improve secure Kubernetes platform patterns for cloud, on-premises, disconnected, classified, and edge deployments</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Own CI/CD and GitOps delivery architecture using GitHub Workflows, GitLab CI, Argo CD, Flux, Helm, Kustomize, and repository-managed configuration across multiple environments and classification levels</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Lead DevSecOps practices including secure baselines, container hardening, SBOM generation, image signing, vulnerability management, dependency risk reduction, admission policy, secrets hygiene, and compliance-aware deployment gates</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, Ansible, Helm, and supporting automation to make platform provisioning, upgrades, rollback, and environment promotion repeatable</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Partner with software, data, and ML engineers to understand service architecture, pipeline behavior, model-serving requirements, runtime dependencies, and production failure modes</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Support and optimize data-intensive and MLOps workloads using technologies such as Kafka, Flink, Pinot, KServe, Kubeflow, Ray, GPU-enabled nodes, and model-serving pipelines</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Build and refine observability patterns using Prometheus, Grafana, Fluent Bit, Loki, Kibana, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Tempo, and alerting workflows that help teams diagnose issues quickly</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Debug complex Kubernetes, Helm, service mesh, Istio, networking, storage, identity, and runtime issues across multi-cluster and multi-environment topologies</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Automate compliance evidence and improve deployment practices aligned with RMF, STIGs, FedRAMP, NIST 800-53, IL4/IL5/IL6, and customer-specific security controls</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Write clean, maintainable automation and platform tooling in Go, Java, Python, Bash, or similar languages to reduce toil and improve developer experience</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Mentor junior engineers, establish repeatable engineering practices, review technical designs, and raise the quality bar for secure platform delivery</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Engage directly with customers and operational stakeholders in Hawaii to support deployments, resolve incidents, explain technical tradeoffs, and convert field lessons into durable platform improvements</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>What we are looking for:&nbsp;</strong></span></p> <ul> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">6+ years of hands-on experience in DevSecOps, platform engineering, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, security engineering, or a closely related role</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">5+ years of production experience with Linux, containers, Docker, Kubernetes, and Kubernetes-based application delivery</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Deep experience building and operating CI/CD and GitOps workflows, preferably with GitLab CI, Argo CD, Flux, Helm, and environment promotion across regulated delivery pipelines</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Strong Kubernetes troubleshooting skills across workloads, controllers, networking, storage, RBAC, admission control, runtime configuration, and cluster health</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Hands-on experience applying software supply chain security practices such as SBOMs, SCA, SAST, DAST, vulnerability scanning, image signing, provenance, policy-as-code, and secure artifact promotion</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience with Terraform and Ansible or similar IaC and configuration management tooling for repeatable cloud and on-premises infrastructure delivery</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Strong understanding of security and compliance practices in regulated or government environments, including RMF, STIGs, NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, and IL4/IL5/IL6 considerations</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience designing observability patterns and operating production monitoring, logging, alerting, and tracing systems</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Ability to read, reason about, and contribute to application code in Go, Java, Python, or similar languages when deployment, reliability, or security requires it</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience supporting data platforms, streaming pipelines, or MLOps workloads; familiarity with Kafka, Flink, Pinot, KServe, Kubeflow, Ray, or GPU-enabled workloads is strongly valued</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Strong technical judgment, written communication, mentoring ability, and customer-facing confidence in high-pressure operational environments</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Active Secret clearance required; must be eligible for and willing to obtain a Top Secret/SCI clearance</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Ability to obtain Security+ certification within the first 90 days of employment</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Must be willing to work onsite in Oahu; candidates must live in or be willing to relocate to Hawaii</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Ability to travel up to 25%</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Highly preferred:</strong></span></p> <ul> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience owning secure platform patterns for multi-classification, air-gapped, disconnected, or classified environments</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Hands-on experience with Istio or another service mesh, including mTLS, authorization policy, traffic management, ingress/egress controls, and observability integration</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience with OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno, Sigstore, Cosign, SLSA-aligned practices, Trivy, Grype, Anchore, Twistlock/Prisma, or comparable security tooling</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience with platform reliability practices such as incident response, SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and operational readiness reviews</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Background with AWS and/or Azure infrastructure, plus experience designing internal developer platforms, shared Helm libraries, environment templates, or self-service deployment workflows</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Experience supporting GPU-enabled Kubernetes workloads, model-serving platforms, data pipelines, or mission AI/ML workflows</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Prior experience supporting Pacific Command, PACAF, or Indo-Pacific joint force programs</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Existing TS/SCI clearance strongly preferred</span></li> </ul> <h2><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">What Success Looks Like</span></h2> <ul> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Raft’s platform deployments in Hawaii are secure, reliable, repeatable, observable, and supportable across cloud, on-premises, classified, and disconnected environments</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Engineering teams move faster because the delivery paths, Helm patterns, security gates, and operational runbooks are clear, durable, and actively maintained</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Security and compliance posture is continuously maintained through automation, evidence, reviewable configuration, and well-understood ownership</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">When production issues occur, you can trace the system from source to runtime, separate facts from assumptions, and drive the team toward root cause and durable remediation</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Junior engineers grow under your mentorship, and customer feedback becomes repo-managed improvement rather than one-off fixes or tribal knowledge</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Clearance Requirements:</strong></span></p> <ul> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Active Secret clearance required to start; TS/SCI eligibility required</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Salary Range: $160,000.00 - $200,000.00</strong></span></p> <p><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><strong>Work Type:</strong></span></p> <ul> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Onsite — Oahu, HI; candidates must be based in or willing to relocate to Hawaii</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Up to 25% travel</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>What we will offer you:&nbsp;</strong></span></p> <ul> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Highly competitive salary</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Fully covered healthcare, dental, and vision coverage</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">401(k) and company match</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Take as you need PTO + 11 paid holidays</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Education &amp; training benefits</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Generous Referral Bonuses</span></li> <li style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">And More!</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Our Vision Statement:&nbsp;</strong></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">We bridge the gap between humans and data through radical transparency and our obsession with&nbsp;the&nbsp;mission.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Our Customer Obsession:</strong>&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">We will approach every deliverable like it's a product. We will adopt a customer-obsessed mentality. As we grow, and our footprint becomes larger, teams and employees will treat each other not only as teammates but customers. We must live the customer-obsessed mindset, always. This will help us scale and it will translate to the interactions that our Rafters have with their clients and other product teams that they integrate with. Our culture will enable our success and set us apart from other companies.</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>How do we get there?</strong>&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Public-sector modernization is critical for us to live in a better world. We, at Raft, want to innovate and solve complex problems. And, if we are successful, our generation and the ones that follow us will live in a delightful, efficient, and accessible world where out-of-box thinking,&nbsp;and collaboration is a norm.&nbsp;</span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">Raft’s core philosophy is&nbsp;<strong>Ubuntu: I&nbsp;Am, Because&nbsp;We are</strong>. We support our&nbsp;<em>“nadi”</em>&nbsp;by elevating the other Rafters. We work as a hyper collaborative team where each team member brings a unique perspective, adding value that did not exist before. People make Raft special. We celebrate each other and our cognitive and cultural diversity. We are devoted to our practice of innovation and collaboration.&nbsp;</span></p><div class="content-conclusion"><p><strong>We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.</strong></p></div>