Staff DevOps Engineer

Ad Hoc is a technology company that delivers scalable digital services for government organizations. The Staff DevOps Engineer will shape technical strategy, lead infrastructure and CI/CD initiatives, guide cloud-native solutions, ensure security and compliance, and collaborate with clients and stakeholders across teams.

Responsibilities:

• Strong influential skills to improve technical decision-making of clients through relationship-building, and to consolidate and simplify DevOps tools and services across multiple teams or programs
• Serves as a mentor to individuals across the team and an emerging people leader, exhibiting high levels of trust, autonomy, and empowerment
• Leads critical or cross-cutting team structures and projects
• Presents on technical topics effectively to clients, stakeholders, partners, and engineers, articulating implementation complexity and cost tradeoffs to inform business decisions
• Guides self-directed cloud infrastructure and pipeline design decisions made by others, weighing cost, reliability, and efficiency tradeoffs at a program level
• Guides the development and operation of the full lifecycle of the solution infrastructure, providing expertise in DevOps use of cloud-based services, defined using IaaC tooling
• Sets direction for libraries, modules, and packages that other infrastructure engineers build and integrate with across projects
• Ensures processes and design provide robust defense-in-depth through security best practices and that systems align with CMS/NIST quality and compliance standards so clients retain ATO
• Establishes and evolves CI/CD strategy — beyond building individual pipelines — to help the broader organization deliver software of higher quality at greater speed
• Ensures tooling is integrated to satisfy non-functional requirements such as quality thresholds, security vulnerabilities, and static analysis across programs
• Plans and executes migrations to cloud-native data services
• Actively participates in, and often leads, conversations and planning sessions with partners and key stakeholders
• Periodically travels to work with and present to clients, partners, and stakeholders
• Elaborates on and evolves complex and ambiguous products to uncover constraints and new opportunities
• Proactively works with government partners and app teams to ensure software shipped across the program meets security, SLA, and performance requirements
• Effectively communicates on existing systems, design decisions, past performance, and project history for bid-writing, tech demos, and other client-facing communications
• Participates in technical depth interviews with new candidates, often shaping the technical bar for the discipline

Requirements:

• • Bachelor's degree and 9+ years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent combination of education and experience)
• • Expert-level mastery of core DevOps concepts: installing software, virtualization, containerization, networking, etc
• • Expert-level knowledge of Terraform/Terragrunt, including module design and multi-environment state management at scale
• • Expert-level knowledge of GitHub Actions and Argo CD, including designing and troubleshooting complex CI/CD pipelines across teams
• • Expert-level knowledge of HAProxy/OpenResty in production environments
• • Expert-level knowledge of AWS Cloud Services, including EKS/Kubernetes cluster architecture, workload scheduling, and lifecycle management
• • Demonstrated experience leading infrastructure design decisions and communicating tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• • Experience ensuring systems meet CMS/NIST compliance standards to support client ATO retention
• • U.S. citizenship or current legal authorization to work and reside in the United States without employer sponsorship is required
• • Candidates must also be able to successfully complete and maintain any required government background investigation as a condition of employment
• • Comfort operating across both DevOps and SRE functions
• • Expertise with observability tooling such as Datadog
• • Experience with security tooling such as Trivy or Aqua
• • Experience navigating the FedRAMP/ATO process
• • Experience mentoring engineers