Position Summary

The Senior DevOps Engineer designs, automates, secures, and supports AWS cloud infrastructure and software delivery pipelines for a mission-critical application supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The position provides senior-level technical expertise in infrastructure as code, CI/CD, controlled deployments, system reliability, production troubleshooting, and federal security compliance, while collaborating with development, quality assurance, security, and operations teams to deliver reliable, compliant releases.

Core Requirements

• Minimum of 8 years with BS/BA; Minimum of 6 years with MS/MA; Minimum of 3 years with PhD, 12 years with a HS Diploma
• Experience with hands-on AWS infrastructure experience 
• Active AWS Associate-level certification and understanding of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
• Hands-on administration of Linux servers (Ubuntu preferred), including scripting and automation of patching, backups, logging, key management, and system hardening.
• Experience with AWS storage (S3, EBS, incremental snapshots, and AMI management), cloud networking and connectivity, load balancing, and Auto Scaling.
• Proficiency with infrastructure as code and CI/CD tools, including Terraform, Ansible, and Jenkins.
• Ability to obtain a VA Public Trust clearance; U.S. Citizen, Green Card holder, residing in the United States for at least three years.

Key Responsibilities

• Engineer and maintain reusable Jenkins CI/CD pipelines for source validation, builds, automated testing, security scanning, containerization, artifact promotion, and deployment.
• Manage releases across DEV, DEV2, TEST, MVC, PREPROD, and PROD environments, using automated lower-environment deployments and controlled approvals for higher environments.
• Provision and maintain AWS infrastructure and Amazon ECS services using CloudFormation and other IaC tools, including IAM, VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancers, target groups, resource sizing, and health checks.
• Build, tag, publish, and promote Docker images through Amazon ECR with artifact traceability and no unnecessary rebuilding between environments.
• Automate Java/Maven API and Node.js/npm application builds, dependency management, linting, caching, and security checks; integrate Amazon S3 and ECR with delivery workflows.
• Lead technical execution of release and change controls, production deployments, quality checks, maintenance windows, and stakeholder communications.
• Diagnose and resolve complex pipeline, AWS, networking, IAM, dependency, configuration, and production issues; support disaster recovery planning, testing, and ongoing environment management.

Security and Compliance

• Integrate AWS Inspector, GuardDuty, and dependency scanning into DevSecOps workflows; identify, assess and remediate vulnerabilities, threats and configuration risks.
• Implement system hardening using applicable STIGs and support security policies, procedures, and controls; review network and system configurations against security requirements.
• Support VA Authorization to Operate (ATO) activities, System Security Plans (SSPs), NIST/FISMA compliance, security control assessments, contingency planning, and continuous monitoring.

Additional Technical Qualifications

• Experience with AWS EC2, ECS, ECR, S3, EBS, EFS, ALB, CloudFront, CloudTrail, EventBridge, IAM, and cloud networking; familiarity with Kubernetes.
• Experience with web and application servers, load balancers, web application firewalls, and container deployments.
• Familiarity with Jira Cloud, Confluence, Slack, Agile practices, release governance, and change management.

Professional Competencies

• Communicates clearly with VA stakeholders, program and project managers, technical leads, architects, security teams, and application developers.
• Demonstrates independent problem-solving, sound judgment, risk management skills, organizational skills, attention to detail, and accountability for delivery.

Collaborates effectively across teams and adapts to changing priorities and technical requirements