Senior DevOps Build Engineer — Secure CI/CD for Defense Tech

Decisive Point; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 175,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision plans

401(k) retirement plan

Paid time off

Job summary

Firestorm Labs in San Diego is seeking a Senior DevOps Build Engineer to own build and release engineering, turning source code into secure, reproducible, deployable artifacts across defense programs. The role designs and maintains CI/CD pipelines, build automation, and artifact management while partnering with development teams for fast, auditable builds.

This position sits at the intersection of software engineering and platform operations, standardizing how software is built, versioned, and

Qualifications

• 8+ years in build/release engineering, DevOps, or software infrastructure roles.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines with GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins.
• Strong scripting and automation skills in Python and Bash.
• Artifact and dependency management (Artifactory, Nexus, or equivalent) and container registries.
• Proficiency with Git-based version control and branching/release workflows.
• Working knowledge of containerization (Docker).
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS or Azure).
• U.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins) that compile, test, package, and publish software across programs.
• Own build automation and release engineering end to end — reproducible builds, semantic versioning, dependency management, and promotion across environments.
• Manage artifact repositories and container registries (Artifactory, Nexus, ECR/ACR), including retention, access control, and provenance.
• Develop and maintain build tooling and scripts (Bash, Python, Make, Bazel, or Gradle) to standardize and accelerate builds across teams.
• Optimize build performance through caching, parallelization, and incremental build strategies to reduce cycle time and cost.
• Integrate automated security and quality gates into pipelines (SAST, SCA, dependency scanning, SBOM generation) and surface actionable results to developers.
• Build and maintain container images and base image pipelines, keeping them patched, hardened, and compliant.
• Automate infrastructure and build-environment provisioning using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Partner with development, security, and compliance teams to deliver self-service tooling and generate audit and compliance evidence from the pipeline.
• Maintain documentation, runbooks, and standards for build and release processes across the organization.

Skills

CI/CD pipelines

Python

Bash

Git

Docker

AWS

US Citizenship

Security clearance

Infrastructure as code

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Artifactory

Nexus

ECR/ACR

Terraform

Job description

Firestorm Labs in San Diego is seeking a Senior DevOps Build Engineer to own build and release engineering, turning source code into secure, reproducible, deployable artifacts across defense programs. The role designs and maintains CI/CD pipelines, build automation, and artifact management while partnering with development teams for fast, auditable builds.

This position sits at the intersection of software engineering and platform operations, standardizing how software is built, versioned, and