Senior Platform Engineer

Calista Corporation•Huntsville, AL

7d•Onsite

About The Position

StraitSys Inc is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to design, build, and operate the delivery platform used across its enterprise IT organization. The platform uses self-managed GitLab Ultimate and Azure managed services, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), to provide shared CI/CD templates, security controls, and deployment automation for containerized microservices. The engineer will influence platform architecture and work with developers and infrastructure engineers to shape how services are built, tested, secured, and deployed. The role also defines GitLab structure and governance across cloud environments with separate compliance boundaries. Infrastructure, pipelines, and access policies are expected to be defined as code, reviewed through merge requests, and applied by pipelines; the role will help convert remaining manual processes to this standard. The position has a start date in January 2027. The selected candidate will begin work on or after January 4, 2027. The role has no supervisory responsibilities. Work takes place in a normal office environment, with extended periods sitting and working at a computer. Occasional work outside normal business hours may be required for scheduled maintenance, upgrades, and incident response. U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain a security clearance are required.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
At least 7 years of experience in DevOps, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering.
Hands-on GitLab CI/CD experience, including reusable templates consumed by multiple projects, such as include, extends, rules, and needs.
Experience administering self-managed GitLab, including installations, upgrades, backup and restore, runners, and permissions.
At least 5 years administering production Linux servers as the primary focus of systems work, preferably RHEL, including systemd, SELinux, storage, and package management.
Experience integrating automated tests, code coverage reporting, and security scanning into CI/CD pipelines, and tracking findings through remediation with developers.
Production Kubernetes experience, preferably AKS, including deployment and troubleshooting of containerized microservices, health probes, resource requests and limits, RBAC, cluster networking, and DNS.
Experience writing and optimizing Dockerfiles, including multi-stage builds, minimal base images, and layer caching.
Team-based infrastructure-as-code experience using a tool such as Terraform, OpenTofu, or Bicep.
Strong Git fundamentals, including rebasing, merge strategies, conflict resolution, tags, and history rewriting; experience helping team members recover lost or diverged commits.
Experience defining branching, merge request review, and approval practices for a development team working in Scrum.
Proficiency in Bash or Python for pipeline tooling and automation, including writing maintainable, tested code.
Experience with Azure managed services such as AKS, Key Vault, Container Registry, and Azure Monitor.
U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain a security clearance.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Azure Government and operating platforms across cloud environments with separate compliance boundaries.
Knowledge of NIST 800-171 or CMMC 2.0 controls and STIG hardening for RHEL.
Experience implementing software supply chain controls, including SBOM generation, image signing, hardened container images, and policy as code for Kubernetes and pipelines.
Experience designing reusable infrastructure-as-code modules in Terraform, OpenTofu, or Bicep, including remote state management, drift detection, and CI/CD plan and apply workflows reviewed through merge requests.
Experience with Helm chart development, Kustomize overlays, and GitOps delivery.
Experience with the Kubernetes Gateway API using Traefik or another implementation.
Experience with automated dependency update tools such as Renovate or Dependabot.
Experience managing Linux server configuration as code with Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or a similar tool.
Experience automating certificate management with ACME.
Experience with Entra ID application registrations and OAuth 2.0 and OIDC for APIs and single-page applications.
Experience enforcing security and compliance requirements in GitLab using security policies and compliance frameworks.
Experience administering GitLab Self-Managed and GitLab Duo Enterprise.
Proficiency in PowerShell for Windows automation, including writing maintainable, tested scripts.
Certifications such as CKA, CKS, RHCSA, RHCE, CompTIA Security+, or GitLab, Terraform, or Azure certifications.

Responsibilities

Install, upgrade, patch, back up, and restore self-managed GitLab Ultimate and its RHEL host servers; manage GitLab runners and identity provider integration.
Configure and administer GitLab add-ons and integrations, including GitLab Duo Enterprise.
Deploy and configure GitLab instances in separate cloud environments as needed, and control the movement of code, packages, and images between them.
Design GitLab group and project structures, including permissions, access tokens, and placement of shared templates.
Implement security and compliance controls across projects, including security policy projects, approval rules, compliance frameworks, and protected branches, managed as code.
Own shared CI/CD templates and project templates, and onboard services to the platform.
Define container build standards, including multi-stage builds, hardened minimal base images, non-root runtime users, and image scanning before registry publication.
Design pipeline structure and environment promotion, including merge request and branch pipeline rules, protected environments, deployment approvals, and pre- and post-deployment validation jobs.
Integrate automated testing, code coverage, and GitLab Ultimate security scanning into pipelines, including SAST, secret detection and push protection, dependency and license scanning, container scanning, infrastructure-as-code scanning, DAST, and API security testing.
Set merge and deployment blocking thresholds and map test and scan results to secure development controls to produce audit evidence.
Introduce and operate automated dependency management so library, base image, and tool updates are submitted as merge requests and tested before merging.
Automate application versioning, releases, and rollbacks; keep SDKs, build and CLI tools, CI and base images, GitLab, Kubernetes, and other platform components current.
Administer AKS and other Azure managed services used by workloads, including upgrades, ingress and Gateway API, network policy, workload identity, capacity, and backup.
Define Kubernetes deployment standards covering health probes, resource requests and limits, PodDisruptionBudgets, autoscaling, pod security context, and labeling and naming conventions.
Help developers deploy and troubleshoot containerized microservices built with .NET, Node.js, and React.
Manage configuration and secrets for workloads and pipelines, including Key Vault integration, environment-specific configuration, protected and masked CI/CD variables, and build-time secret mounts.
Define Azure resources, including identities and cluster configuration, in Terraform, OpenTofu, or Bicep, and help infrastructure teams automate and version-control manual procedures.
Automate TLS certificate issuance and renewal; define monitoring and alerting for GitLab, its runners, and AKS; diagnose and resolve platform failures.
Define and enforce source control practices, including branching, merge request review, and approvals; review developer changes to pipelines, Dockerfiles, and Kubernetes manifests.
Participate in Scrum ceremonies to plan deployments, prepare environments, and coordinate releases.
Document platform architecture, standards, runbooks, and changes, and help enterprise IT colleagues build proficiency with Git, GitLab, and platform tooling.