Platform Operations Engineer

Role Description

This role sits on the team responsible for the Unclassified Managed Service — the platform supporting over 50 internal programs today, and the proving ground where much of ROCKS' platform and automation innovation gets validated before it moves into classified environments.

• Own day-to-day reliability, performance, and operations of Kubernetes clusters supporting active internal customer use cases (including GPU-enabled workloads).
• Partner directly with internal program teams to onboard new workloads, forecast capacity, and support scaling as usage grows.
• Diagnose and resolve complex Kubernetes issues across the platform, escalating architecture-level problems to the Platform Engineering pillar when needed.
• Build and improve observability — monitoring, alerting, and dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana) — to drive down MTTD/MTTR and improve service availability.
• Work with our internal CI/CD partner team to support GitOps-based deployment (ArgoCD, Helm) for internal customers running their software factories on top of ROCKS-managed infrastructure.
• Support infrastructure automation and scaling across bare-metal, VMware, and cloud-adjacent government environments.
• Contribute ideas for platform enhancements based on what you see across internal customer usage patterns.

Qualifications

• Typically requires a University degree or equivalent experience and a minimum of 5 years of prior relevant experience or an Advanced Degree in a related field and minimum 3 years experience.
• The ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government issued security clearance is required. U.S. citizenship is required, as only U.S. citizens are eligible for a security clearance.
• Experience installing, deploying, monitoring, and supporting Kubernetes clusters on-premises and/or in the cloud — with platforms such as Rancher RKE2, Upstream Kubernetes, OpenShift, or VMware VKS/Tanzu.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes-adjacent tooling: Helm, Ansible, Terraform, Python, and Bash.
• Experience with observability and monitoring tooling such as Grafana, Prometheus, Alertmanager, or Loki.

Requirements

• Experience deploying new cloud-native platforms in classified and/or unclassified environments.
• Experience designing and operating highly available, secure, high-performing Kubernetes clusters at scale.
• Experience with VMware, AWS GovCloud, or Azure for Government.
• Experience with GitOps and Kubernetes package management (ArgoCD, Packer, Helm, Kustomize).
• Experience working in an agile/product-mode team alongside product owners and scrum masters.
• Experience with CNCF-ecosystem components: service mesh, service discovery, package management, observability, runtimes, and security.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, life insurance.
• Short-term disability, long-term disability.
• 401(k) match.
• Flexible spending accounts.
• Flexible work schedules.
• Employee assistance program.
• Employee Scholar Program.
• Parental leave.
• Paid time off and holidays.