DevOps Engineer

Knight Federal Solutions is a trusted provider to industry leading prime contractors, the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community.  We have established a company culture that supports our employees, their families and the communities in which they live and work. When you join our team you belong to a group of people that work hard, strive for greatness and care about people.

Our hard work is evident in everything we do.  Whether it be supporting large government programs in the areas of Simulation and Training, Information Technology, Intelligence or Cyber Security we always strive to be the best.  It is for this reason that we have been recognized as a World Class Team Supplier by Northrop Grumman and were also named one of Florida’s fastest growing companies by Inc. Magazine. 

As Knight Federal Solutions continues to grow, we look forward to hiring the best and the brightest to join us in our success!

Job Summary:

Install, manage, and administer a Kubernetes cluster as a collection of virtualized hosts via both web console and CLI.  Ensure availability and performance of applications within Kubernetes cluster through monitoring, diagnostics, and scaling.  Maintain appropriate accessibility of cluster and project resources via RBAC policies.  Support DevOps, automate application deployment, verification, and health monitoring processes.  Ensure the DevOps environment facilitates designing, implementing, deploying, and executing automated tests, and investigating new technologies to improve DevOps processes continually.

Essential Job Functions:

• Ability to Deploy, manage, and administer a Kubernetes cluster and its resources, including horizontal and vertical scaling operations to support platform growth.
• Must be able to author and maintain scripts in a variety of languages to automate k8s cluster deployment, configuration, and long-term maintenance. Work products must be configuration managed.
• Identify resolve issues related to Kubernetes cluster through log effective analysis.
• Assist program stakeholders in troubleshooting issues with applications hosted in Kubernetes platform.
• Support scalability exercises designed to test limits of k8s platform and its hosted applications.
• Maintain DevOps lifecycle for containerized applications hosted in Kubernetes platform, including CM, versioning, and deployment through a CI-CD pipeline.
• Assures system stability, accessibility, and proper configuration of assigned technical systems and components.

Desired Job Functions:

• Support the implementation and operation of a fully automated CI-CD pipeline that leverages enterprise container and virtualization platforms
• Monitor, maintain, install, and support networked virtual machines, containers and software applications
• Assist software developers, integration, and test engineers to best utilize DevOps capabilities
• Trouble-shoot capabilities to diagnose system problems
• Utilize an enterprise software development ticketing system to plan and track work

Required Skills:

• Understanding of k8s platform, including:
  • Node architecture and internode communications
  • Load balancing / ingress traffic management (HAProxy, NGINX, etc.)
  • Storage utilizing externally managed backend volumes (e.g. NetApp).
  • Management of users, groups, and RBAC access controls
  • Cluster certificate management
  • Configuration elements (configmaps, secrets, resource limiters, etc.)
  • Routing with SSL / TLS traffic
• Understanding of modern commercial DevOps tools and processes
• Use scripting languages for automation, administration, data collection and reporting. This job requires the ability to write, test, debug, deploy, and sustain scripts.
• Configuration manage, version control, and backup various scripts and work products created to execute and maintain the environment.
• Prioritize multiple tasks, projects, and demands.
• Lead small projects to research and/or implement new technologies.
• Excellent communications skills and the ability to work well in a team environment.

Desired Skills:

• Solving technical problems involving a variety of integrated software and hardware platforms.
• Strong concept of semantic versioning as applied to a software baseline.
• Experience with scripting / automation tools like Jenkins, Puppet, Ansible, Kustomize, Bash, Python, Powershell / PowerCLI.
• Effective interpersonal and communications skills.
  • Professionally convey system-wide performance information routinely via tools such as PowerPoint, Excel, Visio, Jira, Confluence, etc.
  • Train others to perform similar DevOps and automation tasks. Support a corporate library of knowledge by maintaining and evangelizing content.
  • Interact with developers to understand software changes that will impact development and testing activities, examine any relevant change implementation, then report the changes to developers and testers welcoming feedback for future improvements.
• Experience with team collaboration and ticket tracking tools (Confluence, JIRA, etc.)
• Experience with CM tools like Artifactory, Git, GitLab, MinIO.
• Prior or current experience with Agile development processes.

Required Education/Experience:

• Associates or Bachelor’s degree in a technical discipline such as computer science or information technology from an accredited college or university.
• Three years of work experience preferred.
• Security+ required within 6 months of date of hire
• Additional certification are a definite plus or working towards a certification(s).
• IAT Level II or greater. Security+, CISSP or other equivalent certification within six months of date of hire.

Knight Federal Solutions provides equal employment opportunities to all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, age, national origin, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information or any other protected classification.