Lead DevOps Engineer: Cloud, Kubernetes & CI/CD

SAIC; Annapolis (MD); On-site; USD 200,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

SAIC is seeking a Lead DevOps Engineer to guide a small team within a larger engineering organization. You will oversee end-to-end infrastructure from bare metal to AWS, including Kubernetes deployments, NiFi migrations, and security posture across CNO standards.

You will mentor two sysadmins, collaborate with 25+ software engineers, and champion automation with Ansible, Terraform, and Podman. The role emphasizes reliability, observability, and scalable data workflow platforms.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 14+ years of experience, Master's with 12+ years, or PhD/JD with 9+ years.
• TS/SCI with polygraph.
• Deep AWS knowledge (EC2, EKS, ECS, Lambda, Secrets Manager) and bare-metal/MASH environments.
• Proficient with Kubernetes, Podman, Ansible, and Terraform.
• Hands-on GitLab CI/CD pipelines experience.
• Elastic Stack, MongoDB, Redis, and graph databases (DGraph).
• Cisco networking, CNO concepts, SSP accreditations.
• Data pipelines: Apache NiFi installations and migrations.

Responsibilities

• Lead, direct and mentor two system administrators daily.
• Collaborate with 25+ software engineers to support architecture and design.
• Guide system design, setup, and deployments with software teams.
• Manage end-to-end development lifecycles across secure environments.
• Maintain health of all servers, production and development environments.
• Migrate NiFi and other services from MASH to AWS cloud architecture.
• Architect cloud environments using AWS tools (EKS, ECS, Lambdas, Secrets Manager).
• Manage containerized environments with Kubernetes and Podman.
• Oversee Cisco networking and network performance.
• Ensure security, SSP accreditations, and CNO compliance.
• Ensure observability: monitoring, alerts, backups, DR with Elastic Stack.
• Maintain and optimize deployment automation and CI/CD in GitLab.
• DB admin and optimization for NoSQL stores (Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, DGraph).

Skills

Leadership

Mentoring

DevOps

Cloud architecture

System administration

Security/compliance

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

PhD/JD

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Podman

Ansible

Terraform

GitLab CI/CD

Elastic Stack

MongoDB

Redis

DGraph

Apache NiFi

Cisco networking

Job description

SAIC is seeking a Lead DevOps Engineer to guide a small team within a larger engineering organization. You will oversee end-to-end infrastructure from bare metal to AWS, including Kubernetes deployments, NiFi migrations, and security posture across CNO standards.

You will mentor two sysadmins, collaborate with 25+ software engineers, and champion automation with Ansible, Terraform, and Podman. The role emphasizes reliability, observability, and scalable data workflow platforms.