Senior DevOps Platform Engineer

Leidos

1d•$107,900 - $195,050

About The Position

The Mission Driver Enablement Center (MDEC) Infrastructure Operations Team at Leidos is hiring a Senior Platform DevOps Engineer to support its Enterprise IT Operations Center. This hands-on senior engineer serves as the team's technical lead, guiding solution design, engineering decisions, and implementation across Red Hat OpenShift, Linux infrastructure, cloud services, and DevOps automation. The role focuses on engineering, reliability, security, and lifecycle management of the OpenShift platform and its supporting cloud infrastructure. The engineer leads GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and automation initiatives and partners with development teams to enable reliable containerized application deployments. The position requires infrastructure and platform expertise, practical coding and CI/CD experience, and the ability to translate requirements into maintainable solutions for internal and customer-facing environments.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree and at least 8 years of relevant experience, or a master's degree and at least 6 years of relevant experience; relevant experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.
Demonstrated hands-on technical management, including design decisions, technical reviews, mentoring, and delivery of initiatives spanning infrastructure, platform engineering, cloud, and DevOps.
Hands-on experience engineering, configuring, administering, and troubleshooting production Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Kubernetes environments, including upgrades, capacity management, and operational reliability.
Experience with cloud-native architectures and the compute, networking, and storage services supporting enterprise platforms and containerized workloads.
Strong Linux systems administration experience, particularly Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), including system configuration, troubleshooting, and scripting.
Demonstrated experience implementing GitOps practices and delivering IaC and automation using Git version control, peer review, automated validation, and repeatable deployment processes.
Proficiency in Python or an equivalent programming language, including the ability to develop, test, review, and maintain automation code and operational tools.
Experience designing, building, and managing CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Tekton across development, test, and production environments.
Proficiency with container technologies such as Docker and experience helping development teams resolve container build, deployment, configuration, and runtime issues.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including using metrics, logs, and capacity or performance data to diagnose issues and drive measurable improvements.
Ability to communicate technical decisions and trade-offs, collaborate across teams, plan and prioritize work, and deliver secure, documented, supportable solutions independently and as part of a team.
Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust Clearance, or greater.
Obtain a baseline 8140 certification (IAT Level II): CCNA-Security, CySA+, GICSP, GSEC, Security+ CE, CND, or SSCP within 3 months of hire.
Participate in scheduled on-call rotations, including after-hours, weekend, and holiday support as required.
Kubernetes certifications, such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting Azure-native architectures and cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) environments.
Experience with Terraform, Ansible, or comparable infrastructure automation and configuration-management tools.
Experience with ROSA, EKS, AKS, and other cloud-based Kubernetes and containerization solutions.
DoD Secret clearance and 8140 Level II Security+ certification.

Responsibilities

Serve as the team's hands-on technical principal, establish platform engineering standards, review designs and code, guide technical decisions within approved architecture and security requirements, mentor engineers, and coordinate technical dependencies across infrastructure, cloud, security, and development teams.
Lead the design, configuration, integration, and lifecycle management of Red Hat OpenShift, including cluster upgrades, patching, monitoring, capacity planning, compliance management, and troubleshooting; coordinate Linux, compute, networking, and storage requirements with responsible teams.
Translate customer and operational requirements into system designs, implementation plans, and technical acceptance criteria; evaluate alternatives for reliability, security, performance, supportability, cost, and risk; document decisions and validate solutions before production deployment.
Lead GitOps adoption and continuous improvement, establishing repository structures, branching and peer-review practices, declarative configurations, controlled environment promotion, automated reconciliation, and rollback procedures.
Design, develop, review, and maintain reusable IaC and automation for provisioning, configuration, upgrades, and routine operations; establish testing, documentation, and change-control practices.
Provide technical direction for CI/CD pipeline design, integration, and improvement across development, test, and production environments; partner with developers on container builds, deployment configurations, resource requirements, and runtime troubleshooting.
Serve as a senior technical escalation point for issues spanning Linux, OpenShift, cloud infrastructure, and deployment pipelines; lead root-cause analysis and coordinate durable corrective actions with service owners.
Use metrics, logs, reporting, and capacity trends to identify reliability risks, performance bottlenecks, and optimization opportunities; prioritize improvements with the Operations Manager and stakeholders, refine monitoring and alerting, and validate measurable gains.
Partner with security and infrastructure teams to integrate compliance requirements, access controls, and remediation into platform designs and automation; assess operational impacts and define validation and rollback plans.
Develop and maintain architecture diagrams, configuration documentation, standard operating procedures, work instructions, and implementation and recovery procedures; provide knowledge transfer and technical mentoring.
Provide technical estimates, identify dependencies and risks, and help sequence work through Agile planning and daily coordination; communicate technical options, decisions, and implementation status to internal teams and customers, partnering with the Operations Manager on priorities and resource needs.
Participate in scheduled on-call rotations, including after-hours, weekend, and holiday support as required, following established policies, response-time expectations, incident-management procedures, and escalation protocols.