Federal Kubernetes Engineer: Secure, Scalable Clusters

Accenture; Aberdeen (MD); On-site; USD 100,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Accenture Federal Services is seeking a Mid-Level Kubernetes Engineer to design, deploy, and operate container orchestration platforms supporting defense, civilian, and public health clients. You will harden clusters, implement service mesh, and build observability while enabling secure, compliant deployments.

You will collaborate with application teams to containerize services, enforce resource controls, and accelerate deployments in strict on-prem or air-gapped environments as required.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• 4 years of experience operating Kubernetes in production, including cluster administration, workload scheduling, and troubleshooting.
• Strong Linux systems fundamentals and scripting ability (Bash, Python, or Go).
• Hands‑on experience with Helm, Kustomize, and Infrastructure‑as‑Code (Terraform).
• Solid understanding of container networking, RBAC, and Kubernetes security primitives (Pod Security Standards, network policies, secrets management).
• Must be a U.S. Citizen.
• Experience operating Kubernetes within DoD, IC, or other federal environments subject to STIGs, ATO, or Assured Workloads requirements.
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS).
• Experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, Flux) and service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd).
• Familiarity with a major cloud provider's managed Kubernetes offering (EKS, GKE, AKS) or Red Hat OpenShift.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, or on-prem/bare-metal) supporting federal client production workloads.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for containerized application deployment, including GitOps workflows.
• Harden clusters to meet federal security requirements, including DISA STIGs, Pod Security Standards, network policies, and RBAC configuration.
• Implement and manage service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), ingress controllers, and secrets management (Vault, Sealed Secrets, or cloud-native equivalents).
• Build observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Fluentd/Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry) to monitor cluster and application health.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Helm, Kustomize) for repeatable, auditable deployments.
• Troubleshoot cluster and application incidents, from networking and scheduling issues to resource contention and failed deployments.
• Partner with application development teams to containerize services, define resource requests/limits, and adopt Kubernetes-native patterns (health checks, autoscaling, rolling deployments).
• Support ATO and continuous monitoring processes, including vulnerability scanning and remediation for container images and cluster configurations.
• Document platform architecture, operational runbooks, and onboarding guides for application teams.

Skills

Kubernetes in production

Linux scripting (Bash/Python/Go)

Helm

Kustomize

Terraform

RBAC and Kubernetes security

CI/CD / GitOps

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Tools

GitOps tools (ArgoCD/Flux)

Service mesh (Istio/Linkerd)

Terraform

Helm

Job description

Accenture Federal Services is seeking a Mid-Level Kubernetes Engineer to design, deploy, and operate container orchestration platforms supporting defense, civilian, and public health clients. You will harden clusters, implement service mesh, and build observability while enabling secure, compliant deployments.

You will collaborate with application teams to containerize services, enforce resource controls, and accelerate deployments in strict on-prem or air-gapped environments as required.