DevOps Engineering Manager (DevOps/DevSecOps/Site Reliability/Deployment Engineering) (D.C. Area)

***This position requires a US Department of Defense or Intelligence TS/SCI clearance.

***Due to Government contract requirements, we are only able to hire US citizens or Green Card holders.

***Up to 25% embedded onsite with customers locally in D.C. area with some additional travel as needed to out of area client sites, working in classified or constrained environments, managing Legion Intelligence team members.

About the Role

Legion Intelligence is seeking a Manager of Deployment Engineering to lead the team responsible for deploying, operating, upgrading, and sustaining Legion software across customer environments.

They will lead a team of deployment and DevOps engineers while remaining deeply involved in technical execution as a player-coach.

This individual will own operational readiness, deployment execution, platform reliability, upgrade velocity, and deployment automation across Legion's growing deployment footprint. 

This role sits at the intersection of product engineering, mission engineering, customer operations, and infrastructure. Success requires balancing customer commitments, platform stability, operational excellence, and engineering velocity while continuously reducing the effort required to deploy and sustain Legion products.

The ideal candidate is equally comfortable leading a team, coordinating a complex deployment, troubleshooting a production Kubernetes cluster, and driving long-term improvements that make deployments faster, more reliable, and more repeatable.

Responsibilities

Team Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of DevOps and DevSecOps engineers.
• Establish DevOps standards, operational processes, and team priorities.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, technical excellence, and customer focus.
• Coordinate work across customer deployments, platform operations, and internal infrastructure requirements.
• Drive operational rigor while maintaining a bias toward execution and delivery.

Deployment Operations & Reliability

• Lead the Deployment Engineering team's execution of customer deployments, upgrades, sustainment activities, and operational support.
• Oversee operational readiness, deployment health, and reliability across Legion customer environments.
• Coordinate cross-functional activities required to support deployments, upgrades, incident response, and customer operations.
• Serve as a senior escalation point for complex deployment and operational issues.
• Drive continuous improvement in deployment efficiency, operational reliability, and customer experience.
• Coordinate deployment and operational dependencies across engineering, security, product, mission engineering, and customer stakeholders.
• Lead technical readiness reviews and establish operational standards that ensure deployed systems meet Legion's requirements for velocity, resiliency, and control.

Deployment Architecture & Standards

• Guide the development of deployment standards, operational processes, and reference architectures across Legion environments.
• Partner with engineering teams to ensure new capabilities are deployable, supportable, and maintainable.
• Drive standardization and automation efforts that improve scalability and reduce operational burden.

Platform & Infrastructure Engineering

• Lead the team responsible for deployment infrastructure, operational tooling, CI/CD systems, and platform support capabilities.
• Partner with Product and Platform Engineering teams to support product roadmap execution and operational requirements.

Customer Engagement

• Engage directly with customer technical teams during deployment planning, onboarding, and escalation activities.
• Support mission-critical deployments and operational troubleshooting when required.
• Build trusted relationships with customer technical stakeholders.
• Represent Legion during technical discussions involving deployment architecture, operational readiness, and platform sustainment.

Deployment Engineering

• The Deployment Engineering team is responsible for operationalizing Legion's software across customer environments ranging from enterprise cloud deployments to disconnected and air-gapped tactical systems.
• The Deployment Engineering Manager leads this function, partnering closely with Product Engineering, Platform Engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering, and Customer Success teams to ensure Legion systems remain operationally effective throughout their lifecycle.
• The team's mission is to ensure Legion capabilities can be deployed, upgraded, sustained, and scaled reliably across cloud, on-premises, classified, air-gapped, and edge environments. Deployment Engineering serves as the bridge between product development and operational reality, translating platform capabilities into repeatable deployment patterns and operational processes in support of customer outcomes.
• Success means delivering resilient customer deployments, maintaining operational readiness across the deployment fleet, accelerating upgrade velocity, reducing deployment and sustainment burden through automation, and enabling product teams to deliver capabilities that can be operated reliably in real-world environments.

Qualifications

Required

• 7+ years of experience in DevOps engineering, site reliability engineering, deployment engineering, or related disciplines.
• 2+ years of experience leading technical teams.
• Experience supporting U.S. Government defense or intelligence environments.
• Familiarity with RMF, STIGs, accreditation processes, and security hardening requirements.
• Strong experience operating and troubleshooting Kubernetes-based production environments.
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Experience operating customer-facing production systems.
• Strong Linux systems administration and networking experience.
• Experience managing operational incidents and production outages.
• Ability to lead technical execution while remaining hands-on.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work directly with customer technical stakeholders.

Preferred

• Experience supporting AI, machine learning, or data-intensive software platforms.
• Experience delivering software to disconnected tactical edge environments.

What Success Looks Like

• Legion deployments are resilient, predictable, and operationally ready.
• Customer environments remain healthy across cloud, classified, air-gapped, and edge deployments.
• Software upgrades are delivered rapidly and consistently across the deployment fleet.
• Deployment timelines and support burden decrease through automation and standardization.
• Customer outages are minimized and resolved quickly when they occur.
• Product teams move faster because deployment infrastructure is dependable and scalable.
• New platform capabilities can be operationalized rapidly without creating long-term sustainment burden.
• Legion scales operational deployments without proportional growth in deployment engineering headcount.
• Customers trust Legion to operate in environments where connectivity is unavailable, degraded, intermittent, or operationally risky.