Ops Platform Engineer

Bigbear.ai•McLean, VA

1d•Remote

About The Position

BigBear.ai is hiring for a Dev/Sec/Ops Platform Engineer. The Dev/Sec/Ops Platform Engineer builds and maintains the platform foundation the entire system runs on, owning the event backbone, CI/CD pipelines, and the government cloud environment (GovCloud/IL5). This role ensures the platform is reliable, scalable, secure, and deployable, enabling application, data, and scoring teams to deliver capabilities quickly and safely in a regulated environment. This position is remote however travel within the DMV area will be expected.

Requirements

Must maintain a Top Secret security clearance
Active Security+ Certificate
Ability to obtain AWS Certificate (Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect: Associate/Professional) within one month after onboarding.
Bachelor's Degree and 5 to 8 years of experience; Master's Degree and 3 to 6 years of experience
5+ years of DevOps / platform engineering experience delivering and operating systems in a government cloud environment.
Strong experience with event streaming architecture and operations (Kafka or equivalent), including production support and performance tuning.
Demonstrated experience with infrastructure as code (Pulumi, Terraform and/or Ansible) and disciplined configuration management.
Hands-on experience in AWS GovCloud or Azure Government environments
Strong Kubernetes experience (deployments, Helm or equivalent packaging, cluster operations, and troubleshooting workload).
Experience implementing DoD security controls and remediations (hardening and patching OS)
Experience working in compliance-driven environments (e.g., IL5, RMF-aligned controls) with a security-first operations mindset.
IC/DoD experience

Nice To Haves

Operational ownership: builds platforms that are supportable, observable, and resilient.
Automation mindset: eliminates manual steps via IaC and CI/CD discipline.
Cross-team enablement: designs platforms that help developers move faster with guardrails.
Calm problem-solving: strong troubleshooting skills under real-world constraints.

Responsibilities

Build and operate the event backbone (Kafka or equivalent), including topic design guidance, reliability patterns, throughput scaling, and operational monitoring.
Design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support repeatable, secure builds and deployments across environments.
Provision and manage the GovCloud/IL5 hosting environment, ensuring it meets program security and compliance expectations.
Implement infrastructure as code (IaC) for cloud resources, cluster provisioning, network/security configuration, and environment replication.
Deploy and operate Kubernetes platforms for application and data services, including cluster configuration, upgrades, and workload reliability.
Establish platform observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and operational readiness (runbooks, alerting, incident response support).
Partner with security and architecture teams to implement platform security controls (least privilege, secrets management, network segmentation, patching cadence).
Drive reliability engineering practices: backup/restore, disaster recovery planning, performance testing support, and capacity planning.