Senior DevSecOps Engineer (MTSD)

Mission Driven Research, Inc.; Huntsville (AL); On-site; USD 140,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Mission Driven Research, Inc. in Huntsville, Alabama, seeks a senior DevSecOps engineer to design, build, and operate secure infrastructure, automation, and delivery pipelines for an AI-native defense platform.

Requires a bachelor’s degree, 7+ years in DevOps/security, and an active Secret Security Clearance. You will work on Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and agentic coding tools, delivering secure deployments and observable systems across the MTSD team.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a scientific or engineering field.
• 7+ years of full-time professional experience in DevOps, platform, security, or software engineering.
• Active Secret Security Clearance is required.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate secure infrastructure, automation, and delivery pipelines.
• Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines with guardrails in an AI-native workflow.
• Ensure security, observability, and reliability across the delivery platform.

Skills

Automation scripting

Zero-trust architecture

Networking fundamentals

Security-minded design

Communication

Self-direction

Collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in a scientific or engineering field

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Packer

GitLab CI

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Docker

Kubernetes

Keycloak

Vault

Prometheus

Grafana

Job description

• Mission Driven Research (MDR) primarily operates in the federal government services domain and our primary asset is our employee base. As a result, Mission Driven Research employees are rewarded accordingly with competitive salaries, and a comprehensive benefits package.

Mission Driven Research (MDR) is here to deliver technical excellence with a mission-driven mindset - going the extra mile for our customers, growing our people personally and professionally, and giving generously to our communities. We're looking for a skilled, AI-native senior DevSecOps engineer who will join our Multimode Threat Simulation Development (MTSD) team in Huntsville, Alabama and become part of our rapidly growing defense technology company operating in missile defense, UAS/counter-UAS, and intelligence markets. You will be part of an elite software development team poised to outbuild teams several times our size through principled adoption of emerging toolsets, and backed by a culture of deep respect for our employees and shared mission.

Here’s what you’ll be doing: You’ll design, build, and operate the secure infrastructure, automation, and delivery pipelines as an integral part of a team solving two fiendishly hard, still unsolved problems:

• Build a variable-fidelity, engineering-level defense simulation for multimode countermeasure development: flexible enough to answer many kinds of questions, but highly performant at the specific tasks it's pointed at. People have been trying to build this for >40 years, and the graveyard is full of sim frameworks that ended up flexible, fast, or fit for purpose, but never all three. We think we can actually do it.
• Go AI-native without creating a bigger mess to clean up. Agentic coding tools accelerate the pace of development. But wielded indiscriminately, they end up accruing a mountain of tech debt. What's rare is a process where agentic tools turn into a sustained increase in development velocity with high quality. This requires human oversight and human skill at every point that matters, documentation that stays true, a codebase that people actually understand, and guardrails that keep one bad agent run from torpedoing weeks of work. If you've used these tools seriously, you know exactly which headaches we mean. We intend to avoid them, not suffer them.

As part of this process, you will build the machinery that lets the whole team run at agent speed: the infrastructure-as-code that stands up secure, reproducible environments; the CI/CD pipelines that carry code from agent-assisted development through testing, security scanning, and deployment; and the guardrails and observability that keep human ingenuity and skill deeply integrated in the loop. You'll work within an AI-native workflow that moves at agent speed, guided by your skill and understanding. You'll be responsible for architecture and implementation of the delivery platform end to end, security engineering worthy of the defense domain, and blending AI-driven automation with the judgment that delivers pipelines and environments people can actually understand and trust. This position is considered a senior position. You will need to be able to demonstrate an exceptional degree of technical ingenuity, intellectual curiosity, aptitude for building (as opposed to simply analyzing or theorizing), and clear communication. You will be a self-starter and able to demonstrate a history of seeking out, identifying, and capitalizing on learning opportunities. In short, we're looking for someone with the talent and grit overmatch to build at agent speed without creating fragile spaghetti infrastructure.

Here’s what you’ll need: You must have a bachelor's degree at minimum, in a scientific or engineering field. Also, we’re looking for someone with 7+ years of full-time professional experience in a DevOps, platform, security, or software engineering role. Finally, you must possess or have the ability to obtain an active Secret Security Clearance. Lacking any one of these disqualifies you from this job. You also must have:

• Outstanding demonstrated technical competence and ingenuity in modern infrastructure and automation tooling (e.g. Python, Go, or Bash for automation; Terraform, Ansible, or Pulumi for infrastructure-as-code), and solid platform fundamentals (networking and zero-trust architecture, container orchestration, secrets management, artifact and dependency management, pipeline design) [Must be able to quickly understand, apply, and adapt challenging technical concepts in your domain without a walkthrough]
• Facility with the tools of the DevSecOps trade: Git and code review workflows, CI/CD platforms (e.g. GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins), containers and orchestration (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform, Ansible, Packer), security scanning and supply-chain tooling (e.g. SAST/DAST, container image scanning, SBOM generation), secrets management (e.g. Keycloak, Vault), and monitoring and observability stacks (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana) [AI can generate code and config all day long, but you're the one who has to make the path from commit to secure deployment fast, right, and repeatable]
• Hands-on experience using or harnessing agentic coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code) in real development workflows, both as a user and as the engineer who builds the pipelines and guardrails around them [Must be able to work fluently in an AI-native environment]
• Exceptional aptitude for building tangible products [Must be able to demonstrate this by a portfolio of shipped systems, open-source contributions, or serious side projects]
• Strong intellectual curiosity [You will be asked to leave your comfort zone early and often, so we’re looking for evidence that you’ve done this on your own before]
• Preference for self-directed work [You’ll work with our top technical talent, but we’re looking for evidence that when given a problem to solve, you know how to identify and execute the means for solving it.]
• Demonstrated history of effective collaboration [You’ll be working with multiple other people as part of a variety of integrated teams and must be capable of both shouldering work yourself and leading projects with little guidance. This implies other things like good communication, planning and coordination, and 'soft' skills.]

Other qualifications we hope you bring to the table:

• Experience supporting simulation, numerical, or other high-performance scientific computing workloads [If you've built the environments and pipelines that let compute-hungry software build, test, and run fast and reproducibly, we want to hear about it!]
• Experience working in a startup environment
• Familiarity with DoD cybersecurity and authorization processes (e.g. RMF, ATO/cATO, STIG hardening, NIST 800-53/800-171)
• A background in physics, electrical engineering, or modeling & simulation [Our sim models real-world phenomena, and domain intuition makes you a better builder of the platform that runs it]

Other specifics about this position:

Contingent upon contract award? Yes, this position is contingent upon contract award.

Mission Driven Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including disability/veterans. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. If you are interested in applying for employment with Mission Driven Research and need special assistance or an accommodation to use our website, please contact us by email ([e-mail]) or by phone by calling [phone]. When contacting us, please provide your contact information and state the nature of your accessibility issue.