Principal Deployment Environments & CI/CD Architect

SciTec; Boulder (CO); Hybrid; USD 164,000 - 218,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) match

Health insurance (world class)

Paid time off

Discretionary bonus

Parental leave

Flexible work hours

Job summary

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company in Boulder, CO, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead Deployment Environments. Role focuses on secure, observable, repeatable software build, packaging, deployment, and operation for mission-critical data processing and workflows.

The ideal candidate will mentor teams, design reference pipelines, and guide CI/CD, containerization, and Kubernetes practices across engineering while ensuring DoD security compliance.

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.
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate technical alternatives, validate them through prototypes or pilots, and clearly articulate their tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language such as 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 expertise

Kubernetes

Containerization

Linux systems

Technical writing

Mentoring

Cross-team comms

DoD clearance

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Helm

GitLab CI/CD

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Minikube

KinD

Job description

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company in Boulder, CO, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead Deployment Environments. Role focuses on secure, observable, repeatable software build, packaging, deployment, and operation for mission-critical data processing and workflows.

The ideal candidate will mentor teams, design reference pipelines, and guide CI/CD, containerization, and Kubernetes practices across engineering while ensuring DoD security compliance.