Senior DevOps Engineer

This is a U.S. based position. All of the programs we support require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment. All work must be conducted within the continental U.S.

Who we are:

Raft ( https://TeamRaft.com ) is a customer-obsessed non-traditional defense tech company dedicated to empowering U.S. military and government agencies with cutting-edge AI/ML and data solutions. We are a leader in autonomous data fusion and Agentic AI, with a purposeful focus on Distributed Data Systems, Platforms at Scale, and Complex Application Development. With headquarters in McLean, VA, our range of clients includes innovative federal and public agencies leveraging design thinking, cutting-edge tech stack, and cloud-native ecosystem. We build digital solutions that impact the lives of millions of Americans.

About the role:

Raft is building mission-critical data platforms for the Department of War that process billions of events per day from hundreds of sensors and operational sources, delivering intelligence to operators who use it to make time-sensitive decisions. Our platform runs across multiple classification levels and deployment environments.

As a Senior DevOps Engineer at Raft, you won’t be operating in a pure infrastructure lane. You will be expected to understand the software you’re deploying, contribute to it when needed, and engage with the data pipelines flowing through the systems you manage. This is a role for someone who thinks end-to-end, from data ingest and pipeline performance through to Kubernetes-based deployment, observability, and secure operations in defense environments.

You will work across cloud and on-premises environments, partner closely with software and data engineers, and help Raft maintain the operational rigor and platform reliability that our most demanding customers depend on.

What You’ll Do

Design, implement, and maintain secure Kubernetes-based infrastructure supporting data platform workloads across cloud and on-premises environments

Build, manage, and improve CI/CD pipelines using GitLab and GitOps-based delivery patterns, enabling reliable, repeatable deployments across multiple classification levels

Develop and maintain Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools such as Terraform and Ansible to provision, configure, and lifecycle-manage platform infrastructure

Collaborate directly with software engineers to understand service architectures, dependencies, and runtime behavior, and contribute code-level changes where needed to improve deployability, reliability, or observability

Support and optimize data streaming and processing pipelines built on technologies such as Kafka, Kafka Streams, Flink, and Pinot, diagnosing bottlenecks, tuning configurations, and ensuring data integrity across the platform

Implement and manage platform observability using monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), logging (Fluentbit, Loki, Kibana), and alerting tooling to maintain operational awareness in production environments

Apply and enforce DevSecOps practices including container hardening, vulnerability scanning, software supply chain security, and compliance-driven deployment patterns in regulated government environments

Manage and debug complex Helm chart deployments, service mesh configurations (Istio), and Kubernetes networking across multi-cluster and multi-environment topologies

Support operations across multiple deployment targets, cloud-hosted (AWS, Azure), on-premises data centers, and edge/tactical environments, adapting platform patterns to the constraints of each

Write clean, maintainable automation and tooling in Java or Go to accelerate platform operations, reduce toil, and improve developer experience across engineering teams

Engage directly with customers at the most operationally demanding locations in the Department of War

What we are looking for:

5+ years of relevant hands-on experience in DevOps or platform engineering roles.

5+ years of production experience with Docker and Kubernetes, including provisioning, operating, and troubleshooting clusters in real-world environments

Strong experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, with hands-on proficiency in GitLab CI, GitOps workflows (Flux, ArgoCD), and modern software delivery practices

Experience supporting data-intensive platforms using streaming technologies such as Kafka, or Flink, including configuration, tuning, and operational support

Solid understanding of data engineering fundamentals, including ETL/ELT pipeline design, data storage patterns, data governance concepts, and integration with downstream consumers

Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tooling, particularly Terraform; experience with Ansible or similar configuration management tools

Strong Helm proficiency, including authoring and maintaining charts for complex multi-service deployments

Hands-on experience with platform observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, Fluentbit, Loki or Elasticsearch/Kibana

Demonstrable software dev…