Kubernetes Engineer

Kubernetes Engineer

The Leidos Digital Modernization Sector has an exciting opportunity for an experienced Kubernetes Engineer in Colorado Springs supporting the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command (SSC) Operational Command and Control Acquisition Delta program, known as Kobayashi Maru. This onsite role is focused on designing, deploying, upgrading, patching, and maintaining highly reliable and resilient Kubernetes-based platforms that support the development, testing, security, and delivery of mission-critical software applications. The selected candidate will help build and sustain scalable containerized environments that enable current and future tools and services across the software development lifecycle.

The ideal candidate will thrive in a fast-paced Agile environment and actively participate in daily stand-ups, sprint and iteration planning, retrospectives, roadmap execution, and backlog management. This role requires close collaboration with cross-functional teams, a strong openness to feedback and continuous improvement, and the ability to track and communicate progress, performance metrics, and potential blockers effectively.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Secure and configure containerized services orchestrated with Kubernetes, and its underlying environment.
• Tune Kubernetes performance and identify problems by using service and traffic metrics by establishing monitoring and alerting dashboards.
• Lead the lifecycle management of all containerized services used in the development of Kobayashi Maru software.
• Lead troubleshooting containerized-services and publishing root cause analysis (RCAs) and postmortems with the larger portfolio.
• Establish Service Level Objectives and other Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) related metrics.
• Manage the north-south and east-west network traffic to ensure all container-based critical services are maintained.
• Ensure the Kubernetes environment is running as it should, properly patched and configured, has sufficient resources to run the required applications, and can scale as needed without being overprovisioned.
• Design, secure, deploy, and manage the Kubernetes environment required to support 14 software product teams and thousands of users across the test, IL4 development, IL6 staging/production, and higher classification level staging/production environments.
• Design, implement, and maintain highly available Kubernetes clusters across cloud and on-prem environments.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, and scaling using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Develop and manage Helm charts for application deployment and configuration management.
• Deploy and manage applications on cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
• Monitor and troubleshoot Kubernetes workloads, networking, and persistent storage solutions.
• Implement Kubernetes security best practices, including RBAC, network policies, and container runtime security.
• Optimize performance and reliability of containerized applications in distributed systems.
• Collaborate with development, security, and operations teams to enhance DevOps workflows and cloud-native application delivery.
• Integrate Kubernetes with service meshes, logging, and observability tools such as Istio, Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK Stack.
• Participate in system upgrades, disaster recovery planning, and compliance initiatives such as NIST, CIS Benchmarks, and FedRAMP.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to knowledge sharing within the organization.

Basic Qualifications:

• Requires BS degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, STEM, or IT and 12+ years of prior relevant experience or Masters with 10+ years of prior relevant experience, additional years of experience may be accepted in lieu of degree.
• US Citizen and Possession of a current Active DoD Top Secret Clearance with SCI eligibility.
• Minimum 8 years of professional experience as a Kubernetes Engineer, successfully designing and building distributed systems for mid to large enterprises, including two years of SRE experience.

Possession one of the following certifications:

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
• Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certification or equivalent

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree in computer science.
• Advanced experience with Azure AKS.
• Understanding of hybrid IaaS + external cloud integrations.
• Infrastructure design using cloud-native storage, networking, and security patterns.