Description
• Own the heartbeat of national defense communications. You’ll architect, harden, and scale Kubernetes clusters that keep Air Force Platform One and Air Mobility Command connected 24/7. Every pod you schedule and every ingress you secure directly enables real-time collaboration for warfighters on every continent.
• Design and optimize multi-cloud Kubernetes estates spanning AWS, Azure, and GCP. You’ll craft repeatable, policy-driven cluster blueprints that survive region loss, traffic spikes, and zero-day threats while meeting strict DoD Impact Level controls.
• Guarantee five-nines uptime for mission-critical chat (Mattermost) that carries classified and unclassified traffic alike. You’ll build self-healing deployments, chaos-engineered canaries, and automated rollback pipelines so operators never lose a message—even at 3 a.m. ET.
• Automate everything. Terraform modules, Ansible playbooks, and GitOps workflows will be your daily language. You’ll push infrastructure changes the same way developers push code—peer-reviewed, versioned, and continuously delivered.
• Embed security at every layer. From OPA Gatekeeper policies to Falco runtime sensors, you’ll translate STIGs, NIST 800-53, and CNSSI 1253 controls into living, breathing cluster configurations that pass red-team scrutiny.
• Partner with DevSecOps, Security, and Cloud Architecture squads in a high-trust, fast-feedback culture. Daily stand-ups, blameless post-mortems, and joint war-room sessions keep the mission—and your skills—moving forward.
• Conduct R&D during the weekday evening or overnight shift (5:00 p.m.–12:30 a.m. ET or 12:30 a.m.–8:00 a.m. ET). While most of the country sleeps, you’ll prototype new service meshes, benchmark custom controllers, and refine autoscaling algorithms without impacting peak operations.
• Champion observability and SRE practices. You’ll instrument clusters with Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger, then tune alerts so the right person is paged at the right time—never the entire team.
• Mentor junior engineers and write runbooks that turn tribal knowledge into shared capability. Your documentation becomes the blueprint for future deployments across every DoD program Rackner supports.
• Influence product roadmaps. Your field experience with custom CRDs, operators, and edge cases will guide the next generation of Rackner accelerators and open-source contributions.
Requirements
• Active or ability to obtain U.S. DoD Secret clearance
• 3+ years production-grade Kubernetes administration (cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, RBAC)
• Hands-on expertise with Terraform, Ansible, and GitLab CI/CD in regulated environments
• Strong Linux systems and TCP/IP networking fundamentals
• Nice-to-have: CKA/CKAD certification and multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) fluency
️ Benefits
• 401(k) with 100% match up to 6% of salary
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Home office setup stipend and top-tier equipment
• Remote-first culture with flexible weekday evening or overnight shifts
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