Kubernetes Engineer

Role Description

The Leidos Digital Modernization Sector has an exciting career opportunity for an experienced Kubernetes Engineer to work remote and provide support for the US Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC), Operational Command and Control Acquisition Delta, known as Kobayashi Maru. This role is responsible for leveraging Kubernetes technology to deliver, install, upgrade, patch and maintain highly reliable and resilient solutions for deploying and hosting current and future tools and services needed to develop, test, secure, and ship software applications to production. Candidate will be expected to perform within an Agile framework including:

• Conducting daily stand ups
• Welcoming feedback often
• Sprint/iteration planning
• Duration planning
• Retrospectives
• Executing from the product backlog and roadmap
• Meeting performance metrics
• Reporting on progress and blockers

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 of 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.

Qualifications

• Requires BS degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, STEM, or IT and 8+ years of prior relevant experience or Masters with 6+ 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 Secret Clearance.
• 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 of 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 AWS EKS, Azure AKS, or Google GKE.
• Understanding of hybrid IaaS + external cloud integrations.
• Infrastructure design using cloud-native storage, networking, and security patterns.

Pay Range

Pay Range $107,900.00 - $195,050.00. The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.