Platform Engineer (Software/DevOps)

aqua IT•St. Louis or DC Area, MO

About The Position

We are seeking a Platform Engineer to design, implement, and support modern application deployment platforms with a focus on containerization, orchestration, automation, and operational reliability. The successful candidate will work with application development and infrastructure teams to containerize applications, enhance deployment pipelines, operate Kubernetes-based platforms, and improve the scalability, security, and observability of production services.

Requirements

Active Top Secret clearance (TS/SCI preferred)
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent professional experience.
Approximately 2–6 years of software engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, or cloud engineering experience, depending on level assessment.
Professional experience developing or operating containerized applications.
Hands-on experience with Docker, Podman, or similar container technologies.
Practical experience with Kubernetes or another container orchestration platform.
Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language, such as: Python, Go, Java, JavaScript or TypeScript, C#, Bash
Experience with Git-based source control and collaborative software development practices.
Experience creating or maintaining CI/CD pipelines using platforms such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or similar.
Understanding of application networking concepts, including DNS, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, load balancing, service discovery, and ingress.
Understanding of Linux system administration and troubleshooting.
Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud.
Strong analytical, troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills.
Containerization: Builds efficient, secure, and maintainable container images. Applies multi-stage builds, image-layer optimization, non-root execution, and vulnerability reduction practices. Understands container runtime behavior, resource constraints, networking, and persistent storage.
Orchestration: Deploys and manages applications on Kubernetes or equivalent platforms. Configures workload scheduling, scaling, service exposure, health checks, and rolling updates. Troubleshoots failed scheduling, crash loops, networking issues, configuration errors, and deployment failures.
Automation and Delivery: Creates repeatable and automated deployment workflows. Implements versioning, promotion, rollback, and environment-management practices. Integrates testing, security checks, artifact management, and deployment approvals into delivery pipelines.
Reliability and Operations: Designs services for availability, recoverability, observability, and operational support. Uses logs, metrics, traces, and diagnostic tools to identify and resolve issues. Participates in on-call or operational support activities as required.
Software Engineering: Produces maintainable, tested, and documented code. Applies sound design principles and contributes to code reviews. Understands API design, configuration management, dependen

Responsibilities

Containerize applications using Docker or compatible container technologies.
Design and maintain Kubernetes workloads, including Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Jobs, Services, Ingress resources, ConfigMaps, and Secrets.
Develop and maintain Helm charts, Kustomize overlays, or equivalent deployment templates.
Build and improve CI/CD pipelines for application build, test, security scanning, deployment, and rollback.
Automate infrastructure and platform operations using tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or cloud-native alternatives.
Support deployments across development, test, staging, and production environments.
Implement application configuration, secrets management, health checks, readiness probes, liveness probes, and resource governance.
Troubleshoot container, networking, storage, deployment, and application-runtime issues.
Improve platform reliability through monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, and operational dashboards.
Apply secure software supply chain practices, including image scanning, vulnerability remediation, artifact management, and least-privilege access.
Collaborate with software developers to improve application readiness for containerized and distributed environments.
Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvement activities.
Contribute to technical standards, documentation, runbooks, architecture discussions, and engineering best practices.
Mentor less-experienced engineers and provide constructive technical guidance where appropriate.