Senior/Staff DevOps Engineer, Federal

Description

The company is an incubation firm that builds and invests in fast-growing technology companies across healthcare, cyber, and national security. The team behind this role is a dedicated support group for Red Cell Federal and other partner companies in the company ecosystem, with a focus on federal, government, and national security programs.

The company behind Trase has existed since 2023. It offers an end-to-end way for enterprise leaders to deploy, manage, and optimize AI, and it works on the last mile of AI adoption. Its AI agent work ranked first on the Hugging Face GAIA Leaderboard for general AI assistants, ahead of Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Its agentic applications serve healthcare, oil and gas, and national security.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You will help Red Cell Federal and other partner companies install and run Trase OS in their own environments, working alongside partner engineers, Trase software engineers, the TPM, Platform Engineering, and GRC. The work covers onboarding, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, secure releases, observability, and production support.

The level depends on your experience and the scope you have already handled. Senior engineers deliver and support complex partner deployments on their own. Staff engineers also set architecture across partner environments, create reusable standards, and mentor other engineers.

Partners need repeatable, secure deployments across commercial and government clouds, private networks, and on-premises systems. Their needs include installation, integrations, hardening, upgrades, incident response, and continuous vulnerability fixes. You will own the engineering from the first environment setup through ongoing operations and turn repeated partner requests into reusable platform features.

Responsibilities

• Build and run partner environments on AWS, Azure, GCP, and customer-controlled or on-premises infrastructure, adjusting to each program's access, network, and security rules.
• Package and test Trase OS services and their dependencies with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and approved registries. Keep versioned image inventories, release manifests, and image digests so each delivery includes every required artifact.
• Build reusable infrastructure-as-code modules, cluster bootstrap automation, and CI/CD or GitOps pipelines with Terraform, Pulumi, Argo CD, or similar tools.
• Set up and verify networking, IAM, secrets, certificates, storage, registries, and model-provider connections. Support restricted-network and disconnected setups where needed, working with application engineers.
• Remove or abstract cloud-specific dependencies that stop partner deployments. Test representative agent workflows end to end, covering service integrations, authentication, model access, and persistent state.
• Lead technical triage for partner deployment and production issues across application services, Kubernetes, cloud, and networks. Assign fixes and escalations to named owners and confirm each fix with the partner.
• Ship tested releases, patches, and upgrades using automated validation gates, version compatibility checks, smoke tests, rollback steps, and clear release notes. Confirm that deployed artifacts match the approved release.
• Monitor metrics, logs, traces, audit logs, dashboards, alerts, and SLOs for partner environments. Support incident response, recovery, capacity planning, and reliability work.
• Work with GRC and RCF security teams on container hardening, vulnerability scanning, CVE fixes, SBOMs, and evidence for STIG, RMF/ATO, and impact-level requirements where they apply. Confirm fixes through rescans and deployment checks, and route exceptions to security owners for approval.
• Sustain federal deployments, including Second Front where applicable, through patching, image updates, configuration changes, and continuing security fixes within the responsibilities agreed by Trase and the partner.
• Keep deployment guides, environment inventories, runbooks, and troubleshooting docs current. Run partner onboarding, knowledge transfer, and operational handoffs that state prerequisites, access limits, and who owns support.
• Technical leadership: set infrastructure and reliability direction across RCF and RCP engagements, keeping partner needs aligned with Trase's shared architecture.
• Technical leadership: define practical standards for secure releases, production readiness, observability, and support handoffs in every partner environment.
• Technical leadership: work with the TPM, Product, GRC, and partner teams to clarify requirements, agree acceptance criteria, estimate work, and raise risks and dependencies before committing.
• Technical leadership: convert recurring partner deployment and support needs into reusable automation and platform improvements.
• Technical leadership: mentor engineers and partner teams, record decisions, and reduce dependence on single experts for ongoing operations.

Requirements

• U.S. citizenship is required.
• 10+ years of experience in software, platform, infrastructure, SRE, or DevOps engineering, including hands-on ownership of production systems.
• Deep hands-on experience with Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, and running production clusters.
• Strong experience with Helm and infrastructure as code such as Terraform or Pulumi, including reusable modules, state management, testing, and change review.
• Hands-on infrastructure experience with at least two of AWS, Azure, and GCP, covering compute, networking, storage, identity, and managed services.
• Experience deploying and running software in customer-controlled, private-cloud, hybrid-cloud, or on-premises environments, including adapting cloud-native products to those models.
• Strong grasp of networking, DNS, ingress, load balancing, certificates, IAM, secrets management, persistent storage, and service-to-service security.
• Experience running CI/CD or GitOps systems for releases, upgrades, and rollbacks, plus observability and incident response for production services.
• Strong software engineering and automation skills in Python, Go, TypeScript, or a similar language, and the ability to work across application and infrastructure layers.
• Experience hardening production infrastructure and container images, investigating vulnerability findings, and delivering validated security fixes with security teams.
• Strong partner-facing communication and troubleshooting skills, with ownership of a technical issue from first report through validated fix and operational handoff.
• Demonstrated use of AI-assisted coding and engineering tools to speed up development, infrastructure automation, troubleshooting, operational analysis, or incident investigation.
• Strongly preferred: prior SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering work supporting national security, defense, federal agencies, or other government programs.
• Strongly preferred: an active U.S. government security clearance.
• Strongly preferred: experience operating in restricted-network, disconnected, regulated, or security-sensitive environments.
• Strongly preferred: hands-on familiarity with STIG hardening, NIST controls, FedRAMP, RMF/ATO evidence, or DoD IL4/IL5/IL6 deployment requirements, as applicable to assigned programs.
• Strongly preferred: experience with government cloud infrastructure, including AWS GovCloud, and federal deployment platforms such as Second Front or Game Warden.
• Strongly preferred: experience with software supply-chain security, SBOMs, artifact signing, FIPS-enabled components, Harbor, or policy as code.
• Strongly preferred: experience running long-lived, stateful, data-intensive, AI/ML, or GPU-enabled workloads.
• Strongly preferred: customer-facing, partner engineering, or forward-deployed experience supporting multiple organizations and passing on operational knowledge.

Conditions

Up to 20% travel may be required.

Salary range: $180,000-$240,000, plus bonus and equity. This is the typical range for the role, based on experience, skills, and other factors.

Equal-opportunity and legal notices apply as required by law, and applicants should check the posting's data disclosure terms for how their information is handled.

Benefits

• Career track with potential for fast advancement as the firm grows, based on strong performance.
• Employer-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family, at 100%.
• Paid maternity and paternity leave of 14 weeks at normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO, subject to management approval.
• Professional development and continued learning opportunities.
• Optional 401(k), FSA, and equity incentives.
• Mental health benefits through Tara Mind.
• Cost-effective GLP-1 options through Crux.