Principal Deployment Architect - Kubernetes & CI/CD Leader

SciTec; Princeton (NJ); On-site; USD 164,000 - 218,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

4% Safe Harbor 401(k) match

Company-paid HSA medical insurance

Dental insurance (80% company paid)

Vision insurance (100% company paid)

Life insurance (100% company paid)

Long-term Disability (100% company)

Short-term Disability insurance

Profit-Sharing Plan

Discretionary Performance Bonus

Parental Leave

Generous Paid Time Off

Flexible Work Hours

Job summary

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead Deployment Environments. You will establish secure, observable, and repeatable practices for building, packaging, deploying, and operating software supporting data processing, visualization, and workflows.

This hands-on role combines technical excellence with mentorship and guidance for engineers to adopt best practices. You will evaluate deployment approaches, build reference pipelines, Helm charts, and starter

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of professional experience designing, implementing, and troubleshooting production software systems, including significant experience with build and deployment infrastructure.
• Deep experience with containerization (Docker and/or Podman), including image construction, optimization, and security.
• Deep production experience with Kubernetes, including resource management, scheduling, and troubleshooting.
• Experience packaging and deploying workloads with Helm or similar tools.
• Experience designing and maintaining production CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Experience with local Kubernetes environments (e.g., Minikube, KinD) for development and integration testing.
• Experience with observability, logging, and monitoring for containerized workloads.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, Bash, or TypeScript/Node.js.
• Comfortable working in Linux development environments.
• Strong technical writing, mentoring, and cross-team communication skills, with the ability to influence engineering practices through technical credibility.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Assess current build, packaging, and deployment practices, recurring problems, and capability gaps across engineering teams.
• Define evaluation criteria to select and maintain a Core Collection of recommended deployment technologies, patterns, and practices.
• Document recommended technologies, valid alternatives, and exceptional cases through decision guides, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), runbooks, and troubleshooting guides.
• Build and maintain validated reference pipelines, Helm charts, container images, and starter templates for common deployment use cases.
• Guide CI/CD pipeline design, automation, artifact management, and reproducible builds.
• Establish practices for container image construction, dependency management, image optimization, and image security.
• Guide Kubernetes architecture, scheduling, resource management, and workload orchestration.
• Establish practices for Helm and other deployment packaging, configuration management, and secrets handling.
• Improve local and development environments, environment provisioning, and integration testing workflows.
• Guide deployment strategies, rollback, release promotion, and compatibility management.
• Establish practices for health checks, observability, resource limits, scaling, resilience, disaster recovery, and software supply-chain security.
• Partner with engineers through pair programming, design and code reviews, troubleshooting, and focused workshops to support consistent adoption of recommended practices.
• Collaborate with Data Storage and Workload Communications domain leads on cross-domain problems such as memory pressure, pod restarts, connection saturation, and end-to-end throughput and latency.
• Coordinate with enterprise infrastructure and platform teams on ownership boundaries for cluster operations, cloud accounts, networking, and infrastructure provisioning.
• Periodically reassess and update recommendations and documentation as technologies, workloads, and engineering needs change.
• Track adoption and engineering outcomes against established baselines and report results to engineering leadership.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Skills

CI/CD pipelines

Containerization

Kubernetes

Helm

Image security

Terraform

Cloud (AWS/Azure)

Programming: Python/Go/Bash/TypeScript

Linux

Technical writing

DoD clearance

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science/Engineering/Mathematics/Physical Sciences

Tools

Docker

Podman

GitLab CI/CD

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Minikube/Kind

Job description

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead Deployment Environments. You will establish secure, observable, and repeatable practices for building, packaging, deploying, and operating software supporting data processing, visualization, and workflows.

This hands-on role combines technical excellence with mentorship and guidance for engineers to adopt best practices. You will evaluate deployment approaches, build reference pipelines, Helm charts, and starter