Senior DevOps / MLOps Engineer

SimpliGov LLC; Baltimore (MD); On-site; USD 160,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Life and disability insurance

11 paid holidays

Flexible time off

401k with 4% employer match

Wellness and home office stipend

Job summary

SimpliGov LLC is seeking a hands-on DevOps Platform Engineer to own the Azure-based AI-native delivery stack, including AKS, networking, identity, storage, and environments from development to production.

You will manage IaC (Terraform/Bicep), cost discipline, and security controls in a FedRAMP-conscious environment, while partnering with AI Ops on deployment paths, observability, and compliant inference routes. The role emphasizes reliability and auditable changes.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in DevOps, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering in SaaS environments.
• Deep Azure experience: AKS, networking, identity (Entra), and monitoring; production Kubernetes.
• IaC in Terraform, Bicep, or similar; strong scripting and automation.
• MLOps experience: deploying and operating ML/LLM systems in production.
• Demonstrated cloud-cost optimization and spend-reduction efforts.
• Experience in compliance-heavy environments (FedRAMP, SOC 2, or similar) is a plus.
• Comfort with production access and least-privilege controls.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and operate Azure AKS, networking, identity, storage, and environments from development through production.
• Own infrastructure as code end to end; ensure reproducible environments and platform visibility.
• Operate AI infrastructure: observability, model gateway, and GovCloud inference paths.
• Own cloud and AI cost: metering, budgets, unit economics, and remediation strategies.
• Harden production access, secrets management, and FedRAMP-conscious security posture.
• Partner with AI Operations on deploy-and-release: Octopus Deploy, promotions, rollout, and rollback.
• Build platform reliability: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and capacity planning.
• Provide platform primitives for microservices: service infrastructure and scaling boundaries.

Skills

Azure AKS

Terraform

Bicep

SRE

MLOps

Cost optimization

FedRAMP compliance

Entra identity

Tools

Octopus Deploy

Langfuse

Job description

Role Overview:

You will own the Azure platform behind SimpliGov's AI-native delivery model—infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, observability, AI serving, and cost discipline. This is hands-on production engineering within a FedRAMP-conscious environment, where security, auditability, and reliability are core responsibilities.

Responsibilities:

• Deploy and operate our Azure platform: AKS, networking, identity, storage, and environments from development through production
• Own infrastructure as code end to end: environments are reproducible, drift is detected, and nothing reaches an environment without platform visibility
• Operate the AI infrastructure layer: self-hosted observability and evaluation tooling (Langfuse), product telemetry, model gateway and per-workload routing, and compliant GovCloud inference paths
• Own cloud and AI cost: metering, budgets, unit economics, MACC drawdown strategy, and active remediation; cost is an engineering metric here, not a finance afterthought
• Harden production access and controls: least privilege, secrets management, audit evidence, and a FedRAMP-conscious security posture
• Partner with AI Operations on the deploy-and-release path: Octopus Deploy, environment promotion, progressive rollout, and rollback
• Build platform reliability: monitoring, alerting, incident response, and capacity planning
• Give the microservices decomposition the platform primitives it needs: service infrastructure, scaling patterns, and clean environment boundaries

Qualifications:

• 5+ years in DevOps, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering in SaaS environments
• Deep Azure experience: AKS, networking, identity (Entra), and monitoring; you have run production Kubernetes
• Infrastructure as code as your default (Terraform, Bicep, or similar), plus strong scripting; you automate before you document
• MLOps experience: deploying and operating LLM or ML systems in production, including model gateways, inference infrastructure, or AI observability stacks
• Demonstrated cost work: you can point to cloud spend you found, explained, and reduced
• Experience in compliance-heavy environments (FedRAMP, StateRAMP, SOC 2, or similar) is a strong plus
• Comfortable holding production access, with the discipline that implies

Key Competencies

• Treats environment integrity as sacred: no invisible changes, no snowflake servers, no heroics that cannot be audited
• Cost literacy: reads a cloud bill the way an engineer reads a stack trace
• Automates first: your instinct is a pipeline or a policy, not a runbook step
• Thinks in the open: surfaces risk early and documents what you build
• Calm in production incidents; rigorous in the postmortem

What This Role Is NOT

This is not a ticket-queue operations role and not a NOC seat. If your model of DevOps is executing change requests that other people design, this is not the fit. It is also not a research MLOps role: the AI infrastructure here serves a shipping product for government customers, with the reliability and compliance expectations that implies

How We Work

We run an AI-native product development lifecycle. Autonomous agents participate in planning, coding, validation, and release; humans own judgment, standards, and direction. Work moves through a Plan-and-Review cadence rather than ceremony-heavy Agile. Two standards are non-negotiable: you own and can explain everything you ship, no matter what produced it, and you think in the open, surfacing uncertainty early rather than burying it.

What We Offer:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance plans, with significant employer contributions for employees AND dependents (contributions based on base-level plan; buyup plans available at additional costs)
• Company-sponsored life/disabilities insurances
• 11 Paid holidays
• Flexible time off
• 401k plan with 4% employer match
• Monthly stipends for wellness and home office expenses

Legal Disclaimers:

SimpliGovdoes not sponsor applicants for work visas.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is approximately $160,000.00 - $190,000.00 + bonus + benefits. Individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

SimpliGovparticipates in the federal government's E-Verify program, which confirms employment authorization of all newly hired employees and most existing employees through an electronic databasemaintained by the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security. For new hires, the E-Verify process is completed in conjunction with the Form I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification on or before the first day of work. It is not used as a screening tool.