Senior DevOps Platform Engineer

The Mission Driver Enablement Center (MDEC) Infrastructure Operations Team at Leidos has an opening for a Senior Platform DevOps Engineer to support our Enterprise IT Operations Center. This hands-on senior will serve as the team's Senior Engineer, guiding solution design, engineering decisions, and implementation across Red Hat OpenShift, Linux infrastructure, cloud services, and DevOps automation.

The primary focus is the engineering, reliability, security, and lifecycle management of the OpenShift platform and supporting cloud infrastructure. The engineer will lead GitOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and automation initiatives while partnering with development teams to enable reliable containerized application deployments. Success requires infrastructure and platform depth, practical coding and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, and the ability to translate requirements into maintainable solutions for internal and customer-facing environments.

Primary Responsibilities

• Serves as the team's hands-on technical principal, establishes platform engineering standards, review designs and code, and guide technical decisions within approved architecture and security requirements. Mentor’s engineers and coordinates technical dependencies across infrastructure, cloud, security, and development teams.
• Lead the design, configuration, integration, and lifecycle management of Red Hat OpenShift, including cluster upgrades, patching, monitoring, capacity planning, compliance management, and troubleshooting. Coordinate supporting Linux, compute, networking, and storage requirements with the responsible teams.
• Translate customer and operational requirements into system designs, implementation plans, and technical acceptance criteria. Evaluate alternatives for reliability, security, performance, supportability, cost, and risk; document decisions and validate solutions before production deployment.
• Lead GitOps adoption and continuous improvement, establishing repository structures, branching and peer-review practices, declarative configurations, controlled environment promotion, automated reconciliation, and rollback procedures consistent with security and operations requirements.
• Design, develop, review, and maintain reusable IaC and automation for provisioning, configuration, upgrades, and routine operations. Establish testing, documentation, and change-control practices that reduce manual work and improve repeatability across customer environments.
• Provide technical direction for CI/CD pipeline design, integration, and improvement across development, test, and production environments. Partners with developers on container builds, deployment configurations, resource requirements, and runtime troubleshooting while maintaining platform security and operational standards.
• Serve as a senior technical escalation point for issues spanning Linux, OpenShift, Cloud infrastructure, and deployment pipelines. Prime for root-cause analysis and coordinate durable corrective actions with the appropriate service owners.
• Use observability data, including metrics, logs, reporting, and capacity trends, to identify reliability risks, performance bottlenecks, and optimization opportunities. Prioritize improvements with the Operations Manager and stakeholders, refine monitoring and alerting, and validate measurable gains in stability, resource utilization, and operational efficiency.
• Partner with security and infrastructure teams to integrate compliance requirements, access controls, and remediation into platform designs and automation. Assess the operational impact of proposed changes and define validation and rollback plans.
• Develop and maintain architecture diagrams, configuration documentation, standard operating procedures (SOPs), work instructions, and implementation and recovery procedures. Provide knowledge transfer and technical mentoring so solutions can be operated and maintained by the team.
• Provide technical estimates, identify dependencies and risks, and help sequence work through Agile planning and daily coordination. Communicate technical options, decisions, and implementation status to internal teams and customers, partnering with the Operations Manager on priorities and resource needs.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and a minimum of 8 years of relevant experience, or a master's degree and a minimum of 6 years of relevant experience. Relevant experience will be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Demonstrated hands-on technical management, including design decisions, technical reviews, mentoring, and delivery of initiatives spanning infrastructure, platform engineering, cloud, and DevOps.
• Hands-on experience engineering, configuring, administering, and troubleshooting production Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Kubernetes environments, including upgrades, capacity management, and operational reliability.
• Experience with Cloud-native architectures and the compute, networking, and storage services supporting enterprise platforms and containerized workloads.
• Strong Linux systems administration experience, particularly Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), including system configuration, troubleshooting, and scripting.
• Demonstrated experience implementing GitOps practices and delivering IaC and automation using Git version control, peer review, automated validation, and repeatable deployment processes.
• Proficiency in Python or an equivalent programming language, with the ability to develop, test, review, and maintain automation code and operational tools.
• Experience designing, building, and managing CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, or Tekton across development, test, and production environments.
• Proficiency with container technologies such as Docker and experience helping development teams resolve container build, deployment, configuration, and runtime issues.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to use metrics, logs, and capacity or performance data to diagnose issues and drive measurable improvements.
• Ability to communicate technical decisions and trade-offs, collaborate across teams, plan and prioritize work, and deliver secure, documented, supportable solutions independently and as part of a team.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust Clearance, or greater.
• Participate in scheduled on-call rotations, including after-hours, weekend, and holiday support as required, while adhering to established on-call policies, response-time expectations, incident management procedures, and escalation protocols.
• Obtain a baseline 8140 certification [IAT Level II) CCNA-Security, CySA+, GICSP, GSEC, Security+ CE, CND, SSCP] within 3 months of hire date.
• Kubernetes certifications, such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting Azure-native architectures and cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) environment.
• Experience with Terraform, Ansible, or comparable infrastructure automation and configuration-management tools.
• Experience with ROSA, EKS, AKS, and other cloud-based Kubernetes and containerization solutions.
• DoD Secret clearance and 8140 Level II Security+ certification.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.