Kubernetes Engineer

Description

The Leidos Digital Modernization Sector has an exciting career opportunity for an experienced Kubernetes Engineer in Colorado Springs, CO to provide onsite support for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC), Operational Command and Control Acquisition Delta, known as Kobayashi Maru. This role is responsible for leveraging Kubernetes technology to deliver, install, upgrade, patch and maintain highly reliable and resilient solutions for deploying and hosting current and future tools and services needed to develop, test, secure, and ship software applications to production.

Candidates will work within an Agile framework, attending daily stand‑ups, sprint/iteration planning, retrospectives, and executing from the product backlog while meeting performance metrics and reporting on progress and blockers.

• Secure and configure containerized services orchestrated with Kubernetes and its underlying environment.
• Tune Kubernetes performance and identify problems using service and traffic metrics by establishing monitoring and alerting dashboards.
• Lead the lifecycle management of all containerized services used in the development of Kobayashi Maru software.
• Lead troubleshooting of containerized services and publish root cause analysis (RCAs) and post‑mortems with the larger portfolio.
• Establish Service Level Objectives and other Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) related metrics.
• Manage the north‑south and east‑west network traffic to ensure all container‑based critical services are maintained.
• Ensure the Kubernetes environment is running as it should, properly patched and configured, has sufficient resources to run the required applications, and can scale as needed without being over provisioned.
• Design, secure, deploy, and manage the Kubernetes environment required to support 14 software product teams and thousands of users across test, IL4 development, IL6 staging/production, and higher classification level staging/production environments.
• Design, implement, and maintain highly available Kubernetes clusters across cloud and on‑prem environments.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, and scaling using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Develop and manage Helm charts for application deployment and configuration management.
• Deploy and manage applications on cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
• Monitor and troubleshoot Kubernetes workloads, networking, and persistent storage solutions.
• Implement Kubernetes security best practices, including RBAC, network policies, and container runtime security.
• Optimize performance and reliability of containerized applications in distributed systems.
• Collaborate with development, security, and operations teams to enhance Dev Ops workflows and cloud‑native application delivery.
• Integrate Kubernetes with service meshes, logging, and observability tools such as Istio, Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK Stack.
• Participate in system upgrades, disaster recovery planning, and compliance initiatives such as NIST, CIS Benchmarks, and FedRAMP.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to knowledge sharing within the organization.

• BS degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, STEM, or IT and 8+ years of relevant experience (or a Master’s with 6+ years). Additional years may be accepted in lieu of a degree.
• US Citizen with a current, active DoD Top Secret clearance with SCI eligibility.
• Minimum 8 years of professional experience as a Kubernetes Engineer, successfully designing and building distributed systems for mid to large enterprises, including two years of SRE experience.

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
• Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certification or equivalent

• Master’s degree in computer science.
• Advanced experience with AWS EKS, Azure AKS, or Google GKE.
• Understanding of hybrid IaaS + external cloud integrations.
• Infrastructure design using cloud‑native storage, networking, and security patterns.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, citizenship, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, pregnancy, family structure, marital status, ancestry, domestic partner status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, or any other basis prohibited by law. Leidos will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with relevant laws.