DevSecOps Engineer - Junior

DESE Research, Inc.•Huntsville, AL

13d

About The Position

DESE Research, Inc. is seeking a DevSecOps Engineer to update, operate, secure, and sustain the development infrastructure used by the Cyber Works Division. The role supports DESE employees and subcontractor teammates as they develop and deliver Cyber Science & Technology solutions to the warfighter. It focuses on reliable development platforms, on-premises systems, observability, containerized services, networking, storage, cloud resources, and CI/CD support and development. The engineer will support the full lifecycle of the division’s development infrastructure, from physical servers and storage through operating systems, platform services, container workloads, monitoring, identity, networking, and Microsoft Azure resources. The environment serves approximately 20–30 developers, including DESE employees and subcontractors. The position combines hands-on systems administration, infrastructure automation, and practical troubleshooting. The engineer works with software engineers, cyber researchers, systems engineers, and technical leadership to improve availability, repeatability, security, capacity, and developer experience. Work may include planned upgrades, incident response, hardware replacement, deployment automation, documentation, and CI/CD enhancements.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Cybersecurity, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent relevant experience.
Hands-on experience administering Linux-based development infrastructure, preferably Ubuntu Linux, in a multi-user engineering environment.
Experience operating and troubleshooting on-premises servers, storage, networking, and supporting infrastructure services.
Experience building container images and deploying containerized applications or services.
Experience with Docker Compose, Kubernetes, or a comparable container orchestration approach.
Experience automating infrastructure configuration or operational tasks with Ansible or a comparable infrastructure automation tool.
Experience with Git-based development workflows and a source-code management platform such as GitLab.
Experience implementing or supporting infrastructure monitoring, centralized logging, dashboards, and alerting.
Working knowledge of networking, identity and access management, reverse proxies, TLS certificates, system hardening, backups, and recovery.
Ability to diagnose complex issues across hardware, operating systems, networks, storage, containers, and application services.
Ability to plan and execute infrastructure changes with clear documentation, effective communication, and appropriate risk management.
Ability to work independently while collaborating with developers, subcontractors, technical leadership, and customer stakeholders.
Active Secret security clearance or ability to obtain and maintain one.

Responsibilities

Administer, update, secure, and troubleshoot Ubuntu Linux servers and development services supporting Cyber Works Division projects.
Operate and maintain GitLab and GitLab Runners, including access, upgrades, runner capacity, integrations, backups, and routine platform health.
Build container images and deploy and sustain containerized services using Docker Compose or Kubernetes, as appropriate.
Automate repeatable infrastructure configuration, deployment, patching, and operational tasks with Ansible and supporting scripts.
Implement and maintain observability using Prometheus, Loki, Promtail, and Grafana, including dashboards, log collection, alerting, capacity visibility, and service health monitoring.
Operate supporting platform services such as Keycloak and Nginx, including identity integration, reverse proxy configuration, certificate management, and secure service exposure.
Administer on-premises infrastructure, including server hardware, operating systems, firmware, storage, TrueNAS, backups, and recovery procedures.
Configure, deploy, monitor, and troubleshoot RAID volumes; replace or install server components when required; and coordinate maintenance to minimize disruption.
Manage networking equipment and connectivity for development systems, including configuration, segmentation, addressing, troubleshooting, and documentation.
Manage Microsoft Azure resources used by development teams, with attention to access control, security, reliability, cost awareness, and lifecycle management.
Support infrastructure for AI-assisted development and model-serving workloads, including vLLM and OpenCode, when required by project needs.
Monitor infrastructure health and capacity; respond to outages and degraded performance; perform root-cause analysis; and implement corrective actions.
Maintain system diagrams, configuration records, operational procedures, inventories, recovery documentation, and knowledge-sharing materials.
Collaborate with developers and project teams to evaluate infrastructure needs, plan upgrades, onboard services, and remove technical blockers.
Support secure software delivery practices, vulnerability remediation, secrets handling, configuration management, and compliance with applicable customer and organizational requirements.
Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines and build automation where needed, while prioritizing reliability and sustainment of the development environment.