Systems Engineer – DevSecOps/SRE (w/ active Secret)

CriticalSolutions, LLC; Norfolk (VA); On-site; USD 87,000 - 112,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Dental coverage

401K matching

Paid time off

Job summary

Critical Solutions in Norfolk, VA is seeking a Systems Engineer – DevSecOps/SRE to support a federal customer, focusing on resilience, automated testing, and secure, scalable deployments.

You will author automation scripts, contribute to CI/CD pipelines, monitor systems, and work nights/weekends on-call. This on-site role requires DoD secret clearance and strong DoD tech stack experience. Familiarity with AD, Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms is preferred.

Qualifications

• Must be a U.S. citizen with an active DoD Secret clearance or higher.
• BS degree with 7+ years of general experience and 2-4 years of relevant experience, or a Master's with less than 2 years relevant experience.
• DoD 8570.01 IAT Level II Certification and ability to support operations in classified environments.
• On-site work in Norfolk, VA with willingness to work nights, weekends, and on-call shifts.

Responsibilities

• Test, patch, and upgrade AD, Azure, Delinea, Ansible, MIM, ADFS, DHCP, DNS, WINS, GPOs, and PKI.
• Collaborate with development and operations teams to ensure rapid, reliable deployments and improve platform reliability.
• Develop features with AI coding tools and automate cloud infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.
• Design automated test suites integrated into CI/CD to verify reliability with every release.

Job description

Job Description

Critical Solutions is seeking a Systems Engineer – DevSecOps/SRE to support our federal customer.

The SRE will also develop and execute tests focused on system resilience, performance under load, and failure scenarios. They will work in tandem with other Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and development teams to create automated testing frameworks that simulate real-world conditions that validate system behavior under normal and stress conditions, ensuring our services are resilient and meet established service level objectives (SLOs). Your work will contribute to the development of robust and scalable services that operate reliably in production.

Your responsibilities will include maintaining complex computer systems by writing code to automate software releases, monitor systems, and detect and fix problems before users even know there is an issue. You will use these skills to improve site performance and overall reliability.

The SRE-IDAM role is responsible for supporting, migrating, automation and optimization of software development and deployment process, infrastructure as code, and contribute to the overall maturity of the Site Reliability Engineering program as well as supporting the creation, maintenance, update, modernization, and refresh the capabilities and components of the organization’s Enterprise Network.

The SRE-IDAM resource provides technical leadership and knowledge of related tasks and coordinates with project managers, customers, stakeholders, and engineers to support ongoing activities as well as new projects to maintain, transform, and modernize the organization’s Enterprise Network.

Must be willing to work nights, weekends, and provide on-call support as needed.

Location: Norfolk, VA

Clearance: Secret

Type: Full-time, Onsite

Salary Range: $87,000 - $112,000

Primary Roles And Responsibilities

• Test, maintain (patching, STIGing, and upgrading), troubleshoot, develop, and deliver solutions associated with Active Directory, Azure, Delinea, Ansible, Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM), Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), DHCP, DNS, WINS, GPOs & PKI.
• Work alongside the development and operations teams to ensure speedy and reliable software deployments, monitor systems, and improve overall reliability of the platform. In addition, as you discover and document system bugs, you have the motivation to go off and fix them yourself.
• Develop features utilize the AI coding tool and repository of scripts to automate, scale, test, and secure the cloud infrastructure and the pipelines.
• Enhance performance monitoring of the various systems via Splunk or other dashboard reporting tools
• Identify performance bottlenecks and optimize the performance of cloud infrastructure
• Contribute to continuing our SRE journey by suggesting ways to improve engineering build, maintenance, automation and reliability across the platform with SRE/DevOps tools and Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Develop and code high-quality pipeline automation workflows to support inside and outside the cloud platform that are appropriate for business and technology strategies.
• Develop and execute test strategies that simulate real-world failure scenarios, including network disruptions, hardware failures, and system overloads.
• Create, script, and run performance tests to measure system behavior under varying levels of load and traffic. Identify bottlenecks, performance degradation, and areas for optimization.
• Design, implement, and maintain automated test suites for infrastructure and application components. Ensure that testing is integrated into the CI/CD pipeline to validate system reliability with every release.
• Build automated systems for continuous performance testing, stress testing, and load testing.
• Work closely with SREs, developers, and operations teams to define reliability goals and develop appropriate testing strategies to validate those goals.
• Ensure that new services and features undergo thorough testing for performance, reliability, and failure recovery before deployment to production.
• Validate that monitoring, logging, and alerting mechanisms are functioning correctly by testing systems under failure conditions.
• Ensure that Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are accurately measured and tracked through automated testing frameworks.
• Resolve most conflicts between timeline, budget, and scope independently but intuitively raise sophisticated or consequential issues to senior management.
• Must be willing to work nights, weekends, and provide on-call support as needed.

Basic Qualifications

• Must be a U.S. citizen and possess an active DoD Secret Security Clearance or higher.
• BS degree with 7+ years of general experience and 2-4 years of prior relevant experience or Master's with less than 2 years of relevant experience.
• Minimum of DoD 8570.01 IAT Level II Certification and must maintain certification while supporting the program
• Must be able to support program execution in classified environments and access SIPRNet and therefore will be 100% on‑site.
• Familiarity designing, configuring, and managing Active Directory, Group Policy Objects, DNS, DHCP, WINS.
• Experience with Windows Server 2016 / 2019 / 2022 / 2025
• Experience with SQL Server 2019 / 2022 / 2025
• Experience with automated script design, coding, debugging, and maintenance skills (using bash, python, etc.) preferred
• Experience in CI/CD toolsets (e.g. Jenkins, GitLab, etc.)
• Good command of Linux/Unix and command line knowledge
• Experience in application administration, configuration, and integration
• Familiarity with agile development methodologies
• Skilled and disciplined to work with a distributed team
• Ability to work in a highly collaborative, forward thinking, and innovation-driven environment
• Knowledge of Agile and DevSecOps/SRE concepts and best practices, with a desire to grow that knowledge
• Hand‑on experience with Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, etc.).
• Experience creating JIRA and/or Azure DevOps workflows, projects, custom configurations
• Experience administrating/maintaining SRE platform via Ansible playbooks (e.g. upgrading Jenkins)
• Experience in automating tasks with scripting languages like PowerShell, or Python
• Integrating/maintaining with various 3rd party CI/CD tools like Jenkins and Gitlab.
• Experience with PaaS using Red Hat OpenShift/Kubernetes and Docker containers
• Experience with commercial cloud infrastructure deployment environments such as AWS and Azure.
• Experience with automated provisioning and configuration tools like Terraform, Cloud Formation, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or similar technologies.
• Working knowledge of the Risk Management Framework (RMF), DISA STIGs
• Must be willing to work nights, weekends, and provide on-call support as needed.

Certification Requirement

• Minimum of DoD 8570.01 IAT Level II Certification and must maintain certification while supporting the program

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation for automating test environments.
• ITILv4, Scrum Master, or Agile SAFe certification(s) or applicable experience
• Familiarity with designing, configuring and managing FIM 2010 R2/MIM 2016 synchronization
• Familiarity with VB.NET
• Familiarity designing, configuring, and managing Delinea
• Familiarity with Microsoft Active Directory Federated Services structure
• Familiarity with Cloud Engineering
• Familiarity with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificates

LOCATION

• On‑site 100%. Norfolk, VA
• Other acceptable work location: San Diego, CA and Honolulu, HI
• Must be willing to work nights, weekends, and provide on‑call support as needed

Key Metrics Of Success For The Team

• Improved system reliability, as measured by adherence to Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and reduced Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
• Comprehensive and regularly updated automated test coverage for all critical systems and infrastructure components.
• Timely identification and resolution of performance bottlenecks and failure points.
• Integration of automated testing into the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring continuous reliability validation

Additional Information

CLEARANCE REQUIREMENT

Must possess an active DoD Secret Clearance. In addition, selected candidate must undergo background investigation (BI) and finger printing by the federal agency and successfully pass the preceding to qualify for the position. US CITIZENSHIP IS REQUIRED.

Critical Solutions Pay And Benefits

Salary range $87,00 - $112,000. The salary range for this position represent the typical salary range for this job level and this does not guarantee a specific salary. Compensation is based upon multiple factors such as responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, certifications, and other requirements.

BENEFIT SNAPSHOT: 100% premium coverage for Medical, Dental, Vision, and Life Insurance, Supplemental Insurance, 401K matching, Flexible Time Off (PTO/Holidays), Higher Education/Training Reimbursement, and more.