Site Reliability Engineer / DevSecOps Engineer

Location: Washington, DC; Denver, CO; or Colorado Springs, CO preferred (hybrid). Highly qualified candidates outside these locations may also be considered for unclassified work. 

Work Authorization: U.S. citizenship required

Clearance: An active TS/SCI clearance with CI polygraph is strongly preferred. Candidates without an active clearance may be considered for unclassified work but must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance. 

Salary Range: $145,000–$250,000 USD, dependent on experience level and location

About the Role

We're looking for a SRE/DevSecOps Engineer to build and own the secure delivery pipeline for an AI/ML platform deployed into tightly controlled environments. This is a role for someone who treats security as something you build into the delivery path, not something you inspect for at the end of it.

You own the supply chain end to end — pipelines that produce hardened, signed release artifacts with a software bill of materials attached, with scanning, policy enforcement, and secrets handling built into the path rather than bolted alongside it. That path has to survive promotion into isolated and limited-connectivity environments, which means it works when the network doesn't and can prove what it shipped when nobody can reach back to check. It also has to produce the compliance evidence — audit and accreditation artifacts that fall out of the build automatically instead of getting assembled by hand under deadline.

Reliability comes with the territory. Once the platform is deployed, you're part of keeping it healthy: observability, alerting, and incident response are shared work on this team, and the person who built the release path is usually the one who can tell you what changed.

The engineers who do well here have worked inside a formal compliance framework and know the difference between a pipeline that passes a security review and one that produces the review. Experience packaging or promoting software into air-gapped or otherwise disconnected environments matters a lot — it's the part that's hardest to learn on the fly.

This position is contingent upon contract award. Travel of up to 15% may be required, primarily to Government facilities and between company locations. Unclassified work may be performed remotely, while classified promotion and validation activities require onsite work in an accredited facility and the appropriate security clearance.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and operate the CI/CD pipeline that produces versioned, signed release packages with SBOM manifests, hardened container images, deployment runbooks, and validation procedures for each promotion gate
• Execute the recurring low-to-high promotion cadence through Government-approved transfer mechanisms, including cross-domain solution submission packages, and verify environment parity after each promotion
• Integrate vulnerability management, image signing, dependency scanning, and continuous monitoring into the pipeline so accreditation evidence is generated once and reused at each promotion
• Work with the program's security engineers to keep pipeline outputs aligned to the RMF body of evidence
• Define and track service level objectives, and build monitoring, logging, and alerting with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry
• Lead incident response and run postmortems to closure
• Operate sanitized defect and telemetry feedback paths so issues observed in production environments are reproduced and fixed where the full toolchain is available
• Enforce the constraint that platform dependencies are limited to services confirmed available in the target environments, with development-only dependencies gated behind feature flags
• Maintain deployment runbooks, validation procedures, and operational documentation to a standard suitable for Government review and for execution by other cleared personnel

Required Skills & Experience

• U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance
• 6+ years of experience in DevSecOps, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, or production operations
• 3+ years of experience supporting Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, or similarly regulated programs
• Hands-on experience packaging or promoting software into classified, air-gapped, or limited-connectivity environments
• Strong Kubernetes and cloud operations experience, including operating containerized production workloads in AWS
• Working knowledge of DevSecOps practices for regulated environments, including hardened containers, image signing, software bill of materials generation, vulnerability management, and continuous monitoring
• Experience working within the Risk Management Framework or a comparable security and compliance framework
• Proficiency in scripting and automation using Python, Bash, Go, or a comparable language
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and deployment tools such as Terraform, Helm, or equivalent technologies
• Experience implementing or operating production observability stacks and participating in incident response
• Current DoD 8140/8570 qualifying certification, such as CISSP or CASP+, or the ability to obtain an appropriate certification within 90 days of hire
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Nice to Have

• Active TS/SCI clearance with CI polygraph
• Experience with classified cloud environments, including AWS Secret or Top Secret regions
• Experience with Kubernetes platforms commonly used within Department of Defense or Intelligence Community environments
• Experience implementing or operating under a continuous Authority to Operate model
• Experience automating security evidence and continuous-monitoring pipelines
• Familiarity with cross-domain solutions, guards, data diodes, or comparable transfer mechanisms and their packaging requirements
• Experience supporting machine learning, AI, or GPU-accelerated workloads in production
• Experience supporting rapid prototyping programs or defense innovation initiatives

What We Offer

• Medical, Dental & Vision – 100% paid for employees, 75% for dependents
• 401(k) Match – Up to 5% with full vesting after 2 years
• Unlimited PTO – With a required minimum of 15 days off annually
• Fully Remote Setup – Includes up to $3,000 equipment reimbursement
• Continuous Education –  Includes up to $500 reimbursement
• Disability & Life Insurance – 100% employer-paid
• HSA & FSA Options – With monthly HSA contributions from OpenTeams