Founding Staff DevOps Engineer

Why You'll Actually Care

District Partners is working with a growing technology organization expanding its engineering capability in support of federal programs. They are looking for a senior DevOps engineer to take significant ownership of building and scaling the secure deployment environment supporting this work. This is a true 0-to-1 opportunity where you will have the autonomy to establish the DevOps foundation, make key architectural decisions, build the infrastructure and automation, and have meaningful influence over how the environment evolves as the organization grows.

The Basics

The organization is actively investing in the engineering and deployment capabilities supporting its federal programs. This is a newly created role designed to establish a more sophisticated, scalable, and secure technical foundation as the work expands.

You will initially serve as the dedicated DevOps engineer for this environment. Rather than stepping into a mature function with an established roadmap or another DevOps leader defining the technical direction, you will independently assess what needs to be built, make architectural decisions, write the automation, build the infrastructure and pipelines, and own the environment through production.

What You'll Be Owning

• Architect and build secure CI/CD and software promotion capabilities from the ground up, including how code, configurations, and artifacts move across environments with different security and access requirements.
• Build and automate infrastructure using modern Infrastructure as Code and configuration management practices, with a focus on repeatability, reliability, and security.
• Design and operate containerized deployment environments, including orchestration, packaging, configuration, secrets, access controls, and supporting infrastructure.
• Establish release, rollback, monitoring, observability, and troubleshooting capabilities for environments where engineers may have limited access to production systems, logs, or underlying data.
• Develop the scripting and automation required to eliminate manual deployment processes and create repeatable operational workflows.
• Translate stringent security and authorization requirements into practical engineering controls while creating a technical foundation that can support additional programs and future growth.

The Environment

This is effectively a solo DevOps function at the outset, and prior experience operating with that level of independence is important. You will be expected to move comfortably between architecture and implementation, identify what is missing, make the technical decision, build the solution, troubleshoot it, and continue owning and improving it in production.

The strongest candidates will have demonstrated this somewhere in their career, whether as a sole DevOps or platform engineer, an early foundational hire, or the individual responsible for standing up a new capability within a larger organization. We are also looking for meaningful tenure and sustained ownership, with evidence that you have stayed long enough to build, operate, improve, and scale what you created.

What You Bring To The Table

• An active U.S. government Secret clearance at minimum is required. Top Secret is strongly preferred. Candidates without an active Secret clearance cannot be considered.
• Proven experience independently owning a DevOps, platform, infrastructure, or deployment capability with limited existing structure or internal technical guidance.
• Demonstrated 0-to-1 experience taking infrastructure or deployment capabilities from architecture and initial build through production operation and continued improvement.
• A career history showing meaningful tenure, sustained ownership, and the ability to see significant technical initiatives through beyond initial implementation.
• Senior or Staff-level depth across DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Release Engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Proven experience architecting and building CI/CD, deployment, and software promotion capabilities rather than primarily administering an established environment.
• Strong hands-on experience with containerization and orchestration technologies, including Kubernetes, Helm, or comparable platforms.
• Deep Infrastructure as Code and configuration automation experience using technologies such as Terraform or comparable tooling.
• Strong scripting and automation capabilities using Python, Bash, Go, or similar languages. This needs to be an engineer who can build, automate, and troubleshoot, not simply configure tools.
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating software within federal, classified, disconnected, air-gapped, or similarly restricted environments.
• Strong understanding of artifact management, environment isolation, secrets management, access controls, monitoring, release management, and operational troubleshooting.
• Experience implementing technical controls within rigorous federal security, risk, compliance, and authorization environments.

A Few Things Worth Knowing

• Base Compensation: $170,000 to $238,000.
• Bonus: Bonus eligible. Specific structure and target are still being finalized.
• Equity: Equity participation included. Specific details are still being finalized.
• Location: United States.
• Work Model: Remote
• Engagement Type: Full-time, direct hire.