DevOps Engineer

Exostar • Herndon, VA

15d • $100,000 - $130,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

We’re looking for an infrastructure engineer who builds and ships. This is not a role for someone who hands off design documents or lives only in architecture diagrams. You’ll be writing Terraform, supporting production infrastructure, troubleshooting real issues, optimizing underperforming systems, and automating work so teams can move faster. What makes this role different is how we work. AI is part of your daily toolkit. We’re not looking for someone who is merely “interested in” AI tools—you already know how to use them to accelerate real work. You understand how tools like Claude Code can dramatically reduce the time it takes to build infrastructure, write scripts, or troubleshoot problems, and you’re motivated to apply that speed in a production environment. This is a hands-on engineering role. Expect to spend the majority of your time building and improving infrastructure, sometime designing and refining solutions with more senior engineers, and minimal time in meetings. If your goal is to move away from hands‑on engineering or into a role focused primarily on diagramming and presentations, this likely isn’t the right fit.

Requirements

• 6+ years of hands-on Azure infrastructure experience (Azure Government strongly preferred)
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent experience
• Strong Terraform: modules, workspaces, remote state, provider configuration, testing (Terratest or similar)
• Strong GitHub Actions: workflow authoring, reusable workflows, environments and approvals, OIDC to Azure, secrets management
• Strong PowerShell (Azure modules, REST API calls, error handling, module development), plus working Python
• In-depth Azure networking: VNets, peering, Private Link, DNS, NSGs, Azure Firewall, ExpressRoute
• Azure identity: RBAC, managed identities, PIM and Key Vault access models
• Observability: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics / KQL, Application Insights
• Working knowledge of SQL Server / Azure SQL: backups, performance triage and migrations
• Experience working directly with development teams in an embedded or product-aligned DevOps role
• Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor)
• Git workflows: branching strategies, PR reviews, resolving merge conflicts
• Experience with FedRAMP, CMMC or similar compliance frameworks
• Comfortable debugging production issues under pressure, and taking part in an on-call rotation
• Due to customer requirements, U.S. Citizenship is required. Ability to gain and maintain Trusted Role is required.

Nice To Haves

• Advanced SQL Server tuning: execution plans, index strategies, stored procedure optimization, Query Store
• Schema version control (Flyway, Liquibase or similar)
• Bicep in addition to Terraform
• Container platforms: AKS, Container Apps, Docker
• Azure Service Bus operations and troubleshooting
• Background in defense, aerospace or other highly regulated industries
• You've already changed how you work because of AI tools. You don't just use autocomplete—you've figured out how to prompt for entire infrastructure patterns, optimize complex SQL queries, and iterate faster than you ever could manually. You have opinions about which AI tools work best for different tasks.
• You prefer automation over manual effort. When you see a team doing something repetitive, your instinct is to automate it. When you see documentation that's out of date, you think about how to generate it from the source of truth.
• You can context-switch. Monday might be debugging a DNS forwarding issue. Tuesday might be optimizing a slow stored procedure. Wednesday might be writing a Terraform module for a new service. Thursday might be helping a developer understand why their app can't reach a database. You're comfortable across the stack.

Responsibilities

• Act as the dedicated DevOps engineer for your assigned product team, taking part in their planning, stand-ups and release cycles
• Own the product's infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines and environments (dev, QA, staging, prod) from start to finish
• Be the first escalation point for the product's production issues, deployments and environment requests
• Bring central DevOps standards (Terraform modules, pipeline templates, security and compliance controls) into the product team, and feed the product team's needs back to DevOps
• Generate Terraform modules for Azure Government and Commercial deployments—networking, compute, storage, identity, databases, monitoring
• Utilize AI-assisted Terraform module generation with automated testing, documentation, and compliance validation
• Implement state management patterns for multi-environment deployments (dev/QA/staging/prod) with proper isolation
• Automate drift detection and remediation—catch what changed and fix it before it becomes an incident
• Create GitHub Actions workflows for infrastructure and application delivery: plan/apply gates, environment approvals and reusable workflows
• Implement OIDC federation from GitHub to Azure, so pipelines don't need stored secrets
• Configure branch protection and rulesets, with automated policy and security checks in the pipeline
• Build hub-and-spoke architectures with proper segmentation for FedRAMP boundaries
• Configure Private Link, DNS forwarding, and service endpoint strategies
• Set up ExpressRoute and VPN connectivity for hybrid scenarios
• Manage Azure Firewall and NSG policies with AI-assisted rule generation and audit
• Manage Azure RBAC, managed identities and PIM, with least-privilege access
• Configure Key Vault access models (RBAC and access policies) and secret rotation
• Implement Conditional Access and identity governance across multiple tenants
• Develop PowerShell modules for Azure resource management, database operations, reporting, and remediation
• Write Bash scripts for Linux workloads and CI/CD pipeline integration
• Develop Python utilities for API integrations, data processing, and custom tooling
• Utilize AI-assisted script generation with proper error handling, logging, and testing
• Manage Azure SQL and SQL Server operations: backups, maintenance automation and first-line performance troubleshooting
• Perform zero- or minimal-downtime database migrations with automated rollback
• Utilize Azure Monitor, Log Analytics (KQL) and Application Insights
• Develop runbooks and automation for common fixes
• Optimize costs: reserved instances, right-sizing and cleaning up orphaned resources
• Take part in the on-call rotation

Benefits

• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance, EAP, Flexible Spending Accounts
• 401(k) matching
• flexible time off and sick leave
• training and educational assistance

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior