Senior DevOps Engineer

Why AIS?

When you join AIS, you're joining a mission-driven team that's passionate about making a difference. You'll work on projects that matter, alongside industry-leading experts, in an environment that fosters innovation, driving client success, and empowering our team to make a lasting impact. As an employee-owned company, we value collaboration, inclusivity, continuous growth, and shared success.

• Employee Ownership : Your contributions directly impact the company's success, and you share in its achievements.

• Continuous Learning : Access to resources, training, and mentorship to support your professional growth.

• Inclusive Culture : A workplace where diversity is celebrated, and everyone's voice is valued.

• Mission-Driven Work : Engage in projects that make a meaningful difference for our clients and communities.

What are we looking for?

At AIS, we're looking for more than just skills - we're looking for driven individuals who are passionate about making a difference, eager to grow, and aligned with our core principles.

At AIS, we are dedicated to providing our employees with diverse opportunities to grow their careers while supporting a variety of impactful projects. For this position, we are seeking a talented individual to join AIS as a Senior DevOps Engineer.

• Core Knowledge & Skills: Masters CI/CD best practices and toolchains, multiple scripting languages, cloud platforms, and Kubernetes; integrates security into pipelines (DevSecOps).

• Work & Complexity: Designs complex workflows, leads incident response for critical systems, and automates advanced deployment and configuration scenarios.

• Quality & Independence: Sets a high bar for availability and performance, develops comprehensive test suites, and makes significant technical decisions with minimal oversight.

• Teamwork & Communication: Leads collaborative efforts, mentors juniors, facilitates decisions, and communicates complex issues to stakeholders.

• Consulting & Engagement: Leads optimization initiatives, provides expert guidance on tools and practices, and contributes to strategic projects.

As your initial project assignment, you will support the unique needs of our client as a Senior DevOps Engineer.

Senior DevOps Engineer

Location:

• Occasional onsite visits are in Washington, DC or Austin, TX, but mostly remote.

Security Clearance:

• Secret or (Interim Secret required prior to starting)

Role Overview:
As a Senior DevOps Engineer, you will collaborate with our clients to design, implement, maintain, and test various technical solutions using the latest technologies. You will support the design, implementation, and maintenance of enterprise-grade Kubernetes infrastructure, CI/CD automation, and containerized platform deployments in Azure Government environments. You will be responsible for creating and enhancing various automation processes, including build management, automated deployments, automated testing, and configuration management. Key Responsibilities:

Kubernetes & Container Operations

• Support management of AKS clusters across dev/test/prod environments, assisting the team with day-to-day operations

• Build, scan, and harden Linux-based container images; push to private Azure Container Registry using Docker or Podman

• Work with kubectl, Helm, Kustomize, and Istio service mesh configurations

• Perform container vulnerability scanning with Trivy and remediate CVEs for cyber approval processes

CI/CD Automation & IaC

• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps or GitLab YAML syntax

• Contribute to Terraform modules and automation frameworks used across teams for infrastructure provisioning

• Write Bash scripts for Linux-based automation tasks; PowerShell and Python experience a plus

• Support KEDA-based workload scaling patterns and event-driven architecture implementations

Platform Support & Troubleshooting

• Assist with technical deployments and ongoing operations for platforms including Elasticsearch/Kibana, Keycloak, RabbitMQ, and Azure AI infrastructure

• Troubleshoot complex infrastructure issues involving Application Gateway, private endpoints, Entra ID integration, and APIM

• Contribute to documentation and runbooks that enable team autonomy

Required Qualifications:

• Minimum 5 years of IT/DevOps engineering experience

• Active Secret clearance (or Interim Secret prior to start)

• CompTIA Security+ certification

• AZ-104 or AZ-305 certification

• Strong Bash scripting proficiency in Linux environments

• Hands-on experience building and managing Linux-based containers (Docker or Podman)

• Familiarity with Kubernetes tooling: kubectl, Helm, Kustomize

• Experience with pipeline YAML syntax (Azure DevOps, GitLab, GitHub Actions, or similar)

• Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform

• Understanding of Azure services: AKS, Azure Networking, Entra ID, Azure SQL, App Gateway

• Experience with CI/CD concepts across multiple toolchains

• Scripting experience in Python

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Experience with cARMY Cloud or GOV Cloud.

• Experience evaluating and implementing modern Kubernetes patterns (e.g., event-driven autoscaling, service mesh, GitOps) to replace legacy workloads

• Proven ability to assess existing infrastructure and drive adoption of modern container orchestration strategies

• Experience with Kubernetes-native observability tooling including logging, metrics, and tracing (e.g. Elastic/ELK Stack, Prometheus + Grafana, Azure Monitor / Container Insights)

At AIS, we are committed to offering competitive and fair compensation that reflects the skills, experience, and contributions of each team member. The targeted base salary range for this role is $94,000-$142,000 per year. Please note that this range is provided as a guideline and the final offer will be based on several factors, including but not limited to, skillset and competencies, level of experience, education, certifications, and location. We value transparency in our hiring process and are happy to discuss how your unique qualifications align with our compensation structure during the interview process.

Applied Information Sciences does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other basis. Employment decisions are based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs.