Staff DevOps Engineer

Ad Hoc is a technology company that empowers organizations to deliver scalable, impactful digital services. Using modern, agile methods, our team creates products that meet people’s needs and transform their experience of government.

Our collaborations have shaped some of the defining moments in public-sector service delivery. We’ve helped build products that connect Veterans to tailored services, help millions access affordable health care, and support important programs like Head Start. As we work with agencies to deliver critical services, we’re also changing how the government approaches technology.

Our culture, communications, and tools are built for remote work, enabling us to bring together top talent nationwide. At Ad Hoc, remote life empowers our teams to design work environments that fit their lives and that foster flexibility and collaboration to achieve positive outcomes for our customers.

Ad Hoc values acceptance, accountability, and humility. We aren’t heroes. We learn from our mistakes and improve the process for the next time. We build small, inclusive teams to collaborate closely with our partners to solve the right problems and deliver software that works.

The Veterans Affairs business unit helps transform the VA into a modern digital services organization where Veteran outcomes are at the center of every effort. We partner with the VA to design and deliver seamless user experiences for Veterans, their families and caregivers, and VA employees. By applying better practices in service design, product management, and technology, we enable the VA to increase the use, quality, and reliability of services and decrease the time Veterans spend waiting for outcomes.

In this role, you will serve as an emerging subject matter expert while serving as an individual contributor who exhibits a high level of trust, autonomy, and empowerment. With minimal oversight from leadership, you will be responsible for leading and monitoring the ability to meet scope, schedule, and delivery requirements and may support adjacent programs within the business unit. A Staff DevOps Engineer shapes the long-term technical strategy of the program, representing the software engineering practice in planning sessions, advocating for the best technical solution while communicating tradeoffs. You will serve as the primary lead and proactively communicate with stakeholders while utilizing strong influential skills to drive improvements in software engineering and DevOps processes and practices across teams.

• →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

• 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