Continuous Integration /Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) SME

Overview The CI/CD Subject Matter Expert (SME) is the technical authority for building and operating secure, reliable, and efficient delivery pipelines across on-prem and multi-cloud environments. This role owns the last mile to production and designs, implements, and operates continuous deployment practices that move changes from approved to live with policy, security, and evidence built in. Responsibilities include release orchestration, progressive delivery (blue/green, canary, feature flags), automated rollback, post-deployment verification against SLOs, and end-to-end traceability in ITSM. The role aligns day-to-day practices to federal frameworks (NIST RMF/CSF, Zero Trust/TIC 3.0, SSDF) and sustains ATO requirements through automation. Responsibilities Replace legacy deployment practices with gated, observable, and reversible deployments. Build risk controls into the pipeline, perform pre-prod contract tests, enforce change approvals as code, implement traffic shaping, health checks, and error-budget-aware promotion. Ensure deployments are predictable for executives, painless for engineers, invisible to end users, and auditable for compliance. Maintain standardization with a paved road to production and provide leadership with accurate, real-time status and rollback readiness. Generate audit-ready evidence automatically with every deploy. You will influence the organization to modernize deployment practices and ensure safe, compliant, and efficient releases. What You’ll Need to Succeed Education: Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience (in lieu of a degree, an additional four years of related experience). 10+ years in DevOps/Platform Engineering with hands-on ownership of production deployments at enterprise scale; 3+ years in regulated or federal environments. Proven results improving DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR) using progressive delivery and automated rollback. Proven results improving delivery KPIs while sustaining ATO/ConMon obligations. Experience implementing feature-flag-driven releases, blue/green and canary strategies, and zero-downtime database changes. Experience integrating deployments with ITSM and generating audit-ready evidence for RMF/ConMon. Track record operating in multi-vendor/SIAM environments with cross-team release trains and joint incident response. Security Clearance: Public Trust Location: Austin, TX — Hybrid with periodic on-site meetings This is a contingent posting, expected to start August-September 2026. Technical Skills Release Orchestration & Progressive Delivery: Blue/green, canary, traffic shaping, automated promotion based on SLOs, synthetic checks, and real-user signals; automatic rollback on guardrail breach. Feature Management: Flag strategies, lifecycle hygiene, and blast-radius containment. Policy & Security-as-Code: OPA/Conftest, Sentinel, Checkov, Cloud Custodian; pre-merge/pre-deploy enforcement. Deployment Automation: GitOps with Argo CD/Flux, immutable artifacts, drift detection, auto-reconciliation, promotion through environment rings. Containers & Platforms: Kubernetes/OpenShift operations, service mesh, blue/green and canary releases. Post-Deployment Verification: Telemetry-based health checks, canary analysis, error budgets, and automated tests in production-like paths. Security & Compliance in the Pipeline: Policy-as-code, supply-chain controls, secrets management, and RMF evidence emission per deploy. ITSM Integration: ServiceNow or equivalent, change models, approvals-as-code, deployment records, back-out plans, status pages, and comms hooks. Resilience & Chaos-Safe Practices: Chaos testing in pre-prod and controlled prod experiments with guardrails; scripted DR drills. Cost & Performance Awareness: Ephemeral environments, right-sized runners, caching, and collaboration with FinOps on cost per deploy. Skills & Expertise Outcome Orientation: Design deployments to measurable targets and publish trends (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR, SLO burn). Clear Communication: Explain rollout plans and risks to executives and non-technical stakeholders; write concise runbooks and rollout criteria. Enablement & Leadership: Coach teams to the paved road; lead release readiness reviews and establish a deployment excellence community. Risk Management Mindset: Use counter-metrics to avoid gaming; promote small, reversible changes and safe-to-fail defaults. Collaboration in SIAM: Coordinate cross-vendor release trains and lead post-incident learning to inform pipeline policy. Discipline & Governance: Maintain versioned deployment standards and documentation; ensure alignment with governance requirements. Preferred Certifications AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Microsoft Certified DevOps Engineer Expert Certified Kubernetes Administrator / Application Developer Docker Certified Associate GDIT is Your Place Full-flex work week to own priorities at work and home 401K with company match Comprehensive health and wellness packages Internal mobility team to build skills and advance careers Professional growth opportunities including paid education and certifications Cutting-edge technology to learn from Paid vacation and holidays Salary & Benefits The likely salary range for this position is $165,750 - $224,250. This is not a guarantee; compensation will be set based on experience and location. About Our Work We are GDIT, a global technology and professional services company delivering technology and mission services to U.S. government agencies. We operate across 50+ countries with capabilities in digital modernization, AI/ML, cloud, cyber, and application development. Join our Talent Community to stay updated on career opportunities and events at gdit.com/tc. Equal Opportunity Employer / Individuals with Disabilities / Protected Veterans #J-18808-Ljbffr General Dynamics - IT