Principal Software Engineer - Deployment Environments Domain Lead

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company is a dynamic non-traditional defense contractor that delivers advanced technologies in support of U.S. National Security and Defense. For the past forty-five plus years, we have supported Department of Defense customers by developing innovative remote sensing algorithms, tools, and techniques to deliver world-class data exploitation capabilities supporting missile defense; intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance; space domain awareness; and aircraft survivability missions.

• →Assess current build, packaging, and deployment practices, recurring problems, and capability gaps across engineering teams.
• →Define evaluation criteria to select and maintain a Core Collection of recommended deployment technologies, patterns, and practices.
• →Document recommended technologies, valid alternatives, and exceptional cases through decision guides, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), runbooks, and troubleshooting guides.
• →Build and maintain validated reference pipelines, Helm charts, container images, and starter templates for common deployment use cases.
• →Guide CI/CD pipeline design, automation, artifact management, and reproducible builds.
• →Establish practices for container image construction, dependency management, image optimization, and image security.
• →Guide Kubernetes architecture, scheduling, resource management, and workload orchestration.
• →Establish practices for Helm and other deployment packaging, configuration management, and secrets handling.
• →Improve local and development environments, environment provisioning, and integration testing workflows.
• →Guide deployment strategies, rollback, release promotion, and compatibility management.
• →Establish practices for health checks, observability, resource limits, scaling, resilience, disaster recovery, and software supply-chain security.
• →Partner with engineers through pair programming, design and code reviews, troubleshooting, and focused workshops to support consistent adoption of recommended practices.
• →Collaborate with Data Storage and Workload Communications domain leads on cross-domain problems such as memory pressure, pod restarts, connection saturation, and end-to-end throughput and latency.
• →Coordinate with enterprise infrastructure and platform teams on ownership boundaries for cluster operations, cloud accounts, networking, and infrastructure provisioning.
• →Periodically reassess and update recommendations and documentation as technologies, workloads, and engineering needs change.
• →Track adoption and engineering outcomes against established baselines and report results to engineering leadership.
• →Perform other duties as assigned.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of professional experience designing, implementing, and troubleshooting production software systems, including significant experience with build and deployment infrastructure.
• Deep experience with containerization (Docker and/or Podman), including image construction, optimization, and security.
• Deep production experience with Kubernetes, including resource management, scheduling, and troubleshooting.
• Experience packaging and deploying workloads with Helm or similar tools.
• Experience designing and maintaining production CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins).
• Experience with local Kubernetes environments (e.g., Minikube, KinD) for development and integration testing.
• Experience with observability, logging, and monitoring for containerized workloads.
• Demonstrated ability to evaluate technical alternatives, validate them through prototypes or pilots, and clearly articulate their tradeoffs.
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language such as Python, Go, Bash, or TypeScript/Node.js.
• Comfortable working in Linux development environments.
• Strong technical writing, mentoring, and cross-team communication skills, with the ability to influence engineering practices through technical credibility.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance.

Candidates with the following qualifications will be preferred:

• Experience leading technology standardization, technical governance, or internal developer platform efforts across multiple teams.
• Experience with managed Kubernetes (e.g., Amazon EKS) and AWS or Azure cloud environments.
• Experience with Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Experience with software supply-chain security (e.g., SBOMs, image signing, vulnerability scanning) and DevSecOps practices.
• Experience deploying software in restricted, air-gapped, or classified environments.
• Active DoD Secret clearance or higher.

*Resumes, Cover Letters, and Applications which are generated by AI will not be considered for employment.