Lead DevOps Engineer

Join a high-impact, mission-driven team as Lead DevOps Engineer, where you will help manage the stability, security, and scalability of systems powering complex data transformation workflows and a widely used web-based user interface. Embedded within a broader engineering organization in Columbia, MD, you will lead a small, agile DevOps/SysAdmin team responsible for end-to-end infrastructure, from bare-metal and AWS environments to Kubernetes deployments.

Responsibilities:

Lead, mentor, and direct the daily tasks of two system administrators.
Collaborate with and support the larger team of 25+ software engineers.
Provide guidance, advice, and assistance for overall system design and setup in conjunction with software engineering teams.
Maintain system platforms and health of all servers (EC2, MASH, bare metal), production systems, development environments.
Facilitate migration of Apache Nifi installations and other services from MASH environment to AWS cloud-based architecture.
Oversee system maintenance, security, and intelligence accreditations.
Maintain observability of the system with automation, monitoring, alerting, backup, and disaster recovery strategies for all environments.
Maintain deployment automation process (e.g., CI/CD in GitLab).
Perform database administration with databases such as Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, or graph databases (eg. DGraph).

Required Skills:

Strong Linux system administration experience (e.g., RHEL9).
Experience in containerization using Podman and Kubernetes for deploying and managing applications.
Amazon AWS experience (setting up EC2 instances, S3 buckets, VPCs, IAM).
Proficient in system automation and scripting tools such as Ansible (including Semaphore), Terraform, Packer, Bash, and Python.
Knowledge of intelligence compliance and processes, including STE/STN.
Metrics and observability with Kibana, Grafana, and Prometheus.

Nice to Have:

Apache Nifi dataflow experience.
Familiarity with database administration with databases such as Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, or graph databases (e.g., DGraph).
Elastic stack experience (logstash, filebeat, etc.).
Graph database experience.
Experience with other AWS tools such as EKS, ECS, Lambdas, and Secrets Manager.
CI/CD in GitLab.
Vulnerability research or security analysis experience.

Experience Required: 12 years with Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline, or 16 years without degree

Location: Columbia, MD

Clearance: TS/SCI with Polygraph required

Salary Range: $179,000 - $213,000

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