Lead Principal Software Engineer Skill Level 3
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Job Location:
Fort Meade, MD - USA
Monthly Salary:
Not Disclosed
Posted on:
6 hours ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Job Summary
TECHNICAL SKILLS
Must Have
- Fort Meade on-site SCIF experience
- GitOps - ArgoCD or Fleet
- Go (Golang) or Python cloud-native development
- Helm chart development and templating
- Infrastructure-as-code - Terraform or Ansible
- Kubernetes - CRDs Helm multi-tenant deployments
- Kubernetes operator/controller development
- Secrets management in Kubernetes
- Technical mentorship and code review leadership
Nice To Have
- AWS GovCloud / C2S IC cloud
- CISSP / CASP certification
- Cross-domain solution (CDS) experience
- OpenShift or Rancher Government Solutions
- Open-source Kubernetes ecosystem contributions
- Prometheus / Grafana / OpenTelemetry observability
- Service mesh (Istio / Linkerd)
- TypeScript
Key Responsibilities
Distributed Application Orchestration and Kubernetes Platform
- Design scalable workflows for deploying and managing Kubernetes-native applications including multi-tenant and multi-cluster configurations
- Lead development of reusable Helm charts GitOps templates and deployment strategies
- Build system-aware controllers or agents that automate application lifecycle tasks
- Contribute to platform-wide architecture decisions including deployment strategy multi-cluster config and observability
Event-Driven and Agent-Based Systems
- Design and implement event-driven architectures using Kafka controller patterns or equivalent technologies
- Build and maintain custom Kubernetes controllers and operators using Go or Python
- Ensure event-driven systems meet reliability and security requirements for classified operations
Infrastructure Automation and DevOps
- Implement infrastructure-as-code using Terraform cloud-init Ansible or equivalent tooling
- Support GitOps pipeline design using ArgoCD Fleet or equivalent
- Collaborate with DevOps and platform teams to ensure secure compliant deployments
- Contribute to CI/CD pipeline design and code review standards
Leadership and Mentorship
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers; conduct code reviews for reliability and security
- Guide the team through design decisions and engineering tradeoffs
- Help shape internal standards shared tooling and reusable component frameworks
- Think in systems not just services: evaluate cross-cutting concerns in all designs
Security-Compliant Deployments
- Ensure containerized deployments adhere to DISA STIGs and program security policies
- Balance automation and operator oversight in classified environments
- Support secure secrets management and certificate lifecycle integration in Kubernetes
Qualifications
Education: Bachelors degree in Computer Science Software Engineering or related field. Equivalent experience may be substituted.
Experience: 8 years of software engineering experience with majority in cloud-native Kubernetes-based or distributed systems contexts.
Additional Required Qualifications:
- Active TS/SCI clearance with Full Scope Polygraph - must be active prior to start
- Deep experience coding in Go and/or Python in cloud-native contexts
- Strong Kubernetes expertise: CRDs Helm GitOps multi-tenant deployments
- Experience with event-driven or agent-based systems (Kafka controller patterns)
- Familiarity with infrastructure automation (Terraform Ansible)
- Demonstrated end-to-end system component delivery ownership
- Proven mentorship and technical leadership capability
- Comfortable balancing automation with operator oversight in classified environments
Desired Skills
- TypeScript for frontend or tooling development
- OpenShift or Rancher Government Solutions in air-gapped deployments
- Service mesh technologies (Istio Linkerd)
- Observability tooling: Prometheus Grafana OpenTelemetry
- AWS GovCloud C2S/SC2S classified cloud experience
- Cross-domain solution (CDS) experience
- DoD 8140 IASAE Level II or III (CASP CISSP)
