Staff DevSecOps Engineer

Arete Associates•West Falls Church, VA

45d•$120,000 - $150,000•Onsite

About The Position

Areté is seeking a DevSecOps Engineer who is here for one purpose: to make our software development teams fast and successful on GitLab and our CI/CD tooling. You will own the day-to-day health of our self-hosted GitLab environment, build and troubleshoot the pipelines our developers depend on, and integrate security scanning into those pipelines so compliance is something the pipeline handles rather than something developers fight. You are the person a developer goes to when a build, runner, or merge request workflow is broken. This is a hands-on engineering role with a heavy support and enablement component — a substantial part of the job is unblocking other engineers, writing the documentation that prevents the next ticket, and steadily raising the team's practices. This position is onsite at our Falls Church, VA facility. The candidate will collaborate with Cyber Security and IT staff members, travel occasionally, and provide some afterhours support. This is an exempt non-supervisory full-time position.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Cybersecurity, or a related discipline, or an additional 2 years of relevant work experience in lieu of a degree.
Minimum of 3 years of hands-on DevOps or DevSecOps experience with modern CI/CD pipelines
Demonstrated ability to build, debug, and optimize GitLab CI pipelines — .gitlab-ci.yml authoring, CI/CD components and templates, and diagnosing failures across build, test, packaging, and deployment stages. Experience with self-hosted GitLab, as an administrator or advanced user, is strongly preferred.
Proficiency in Linux system administration (RHEL, Rocky, or Ubuntu), including networking fundamentals, system services, logging, and certificate management.
Hands-on experience with Docker and container lifecycle management — image creation, registries, and image tagging/promotion.
Experience automating tasks with Bash, Python, or PowerShell.
Experience integrating at least one class of security tooling into pipelines — SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, secret scanning, or container image scanning.
Demonstrated ability to support developers directly — resolving CI/CD and Git workflow issues, teaching Git fundamentals (branching, rebasing, merge conflict resolution, repository hygiene), writing clear documentation and runbooks, and explaining technical issues to engineers and non-technical stakeholders alike.
Must hold an active Top Secret security clearance, or be eligible to obtain and maintain one.
Must have or be able to obtain a CompTIA Security+ CE certification within 120 days of employment, in accordance with DoDM 8140.03 and DFARS 252.239-7001.

Nice To Haves

Active Top Secret security clearance; TS/SCI with polygraph is a plus.
Experience administering self-hosted GitLab — Runner configuration and scaling, project and group permissions, integrations, and registries.
Experience with an enterprise artifact repository — JFrog Artifactory preferred; Sonatype Nexus or the GitLab Package/Container Registry comparable; administration experience a plus.
Working experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or Azure Bicep) and configuration management or deployment packaging tools such as Ansible or Helm.
Experience with Kubernetes or OpenShift.
Experience with container security practices — image signing, SBOM generation, and policy enforcement.
Familiarity with secure SDLC practices, OWASP Top 10, and compliance frameworks such as NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, FedRAMP, JSIG, or ITAR.
Experience supporting development in classified, airgapped, or otherwise disconnected environments, including offline dependency and artifact management.
Experience with GitOps deployment patterns, Azure DevOps, or cloud-native CI/CD services.
Certifications such as GitLab Certified CI/CD Associate or Specialist, Docker or Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKAD), or cloud associate certifications.

Responsibilities

Serve as the primary point of contact for development teams on pipeline failures, GitLab access and permissions, runner issues, package and container registry usage, merge request workflows, and environment troubleshooting.
Build reusable pipeline templates, CI/CD components, and project scaffolding so teams start from a working, secure baseline instead of copying a pipeline from another repo.
Create onboarding guides, runbooks, and internal documentation; run training sessions on Git workflow, pipeline authoring, and secure development practices.
Advise developers on branching strategy, code review practice, versioning, and release management.
Build, maintain, optimize, and troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines in GitLab CI, automating builds, tests, deployments, and security scans.
Improve build reliability and speed — caching, artifact management, parallelization, runner sizing and scaling.
Manage GitLab Runners across environments, including containerized and self-hosted runner fleets.
Administer self-hosted GitLab: upgrades, migrations, backups and restore testing, runners, integrations, monitoring, permissions, and security configuration.
Administer Areté's artifact repository (JFrog Artifactory) — repository structure, retention policy, remote/proxy repositories for external packages, and access control.
Administer supporting DevSecOps services such as SonarQube, a secrets manager, and container registries; perform Linux system administration (RHEL, Rocky, or Ubuntu) for the platform, including system services, logging, and SSL/TLS certificate management.
Implement and maintain SAST, DAST, software composition analysis, container image scanning, secret scanning, and SBOM generation within pipelines.
Configure quality and security gates, and work with development teams to triage and resolve findings rather than simply reporting them.
Manage build-time secrets, signing, and artifact provenance in line with Areté's security requirements.
Automate platform, build, and remediation tasks using Bash, Python, or PowerShell; manage infrastructure and configuration with IaC and deployment tooling.
Maintain DevSecOps procedures, system documentation, and standard operating procedures; support change management, audit readiness, and compliance-aligned workflows.
Track and report metrics on build times, pipeline reliability, and security posture, and drive measurable improvement.
Other duties, as assigned.