Sr Principal DevOps Engineer

RELOCATION ASSISTANCE:
Relocation assistance may be available

CLEARANCE REQUIRED FOR START:
Yes

CLEARANCE TYPE: SCI

TRAVEL:
Yes, 10% of the Time

At Northrop Grumman, our employees have incredible opportunities to work on revolutionary systems that impact people's lives around the world today, and for generations to come. Our pioneering and inventive spirit has enabled us to be at the forefront of many technological advancements in our nation's history - from the first flight across the Atlantic Ocean, to stealth bombers, to landing on the moon.

We look for people who have bold new ideas, courage and a pioneering spirit to join forces to invent the future, and have fun along the way. Our culture thrives on intellectual curiosity, cognitive diversity and bringing your whole self to work - and we have an insatiable drive to do what others think is impossible. Our employees are not only part of history, they're making history.

Northrop Grumman’s Space Sector is seeking a Sr Principal Dev Ops Engineer to join our team in Aurora, CO to support on-premises mission systems by operating, maintaining, and incrementally enhancing existing Dev Ops and platform solutions. The engineer will work within established architectures and standards rather than designing new solutions, focusing on reliability, security, and continuous improvement of current environments. The position can be based in Fairfax, VA.

This position will work a 9/80 schedule, with every other Friday off.

• Operate and maintain existing Git Lab CI/CD infrastructure including patching and permissions. Advise on updates to jobs, runners, variables, and approvals to improve stability and throughput.
• Administer Nexus artifact repositories including patching, backups, access management, repository configuration, cleanup/retention policies, and routine health checks.
• Maintain Apache NiFi infrastructure including patching, troubleshooting, performance tuning, and implementing changes defined by senior engineers.
• Support installation and day-to-day operations of Kubernetes on-prem clusters, including patching, storage management, deployments, rollouts/rollbacks, configuration updates, and resource adjustments.
• Maintain and extend monitoring and alerting using Grafana and Prometheus for on-prem infrastructure and applications, including patching, access control, refining dashboards, alert rules, and service onboarding within existing observability patterns.
• Implement incremental improvements to existing Dev Ops tooling and workflows (e.g., adding tests, improving pipeline stages, automating manual steps) consistent with established designs and security baselines.
• Perform routine incident response and problem resolution for build, deployment, and runtime issues across CI/CD, Kubernetes, Nexus, NiFi, and supporting services.
• Apply existing security and compliance controls across the Dev Ops toolchain: secrets management, access controls, certificate and credential rotation, image scanning, and log retention in accordance with program requirements.
• Follow formal change management processes, including documenting changes, participating in reviews, and updating runbooks, SOPs, and technical documentation.
• Collaborate with senior engineers, system administrators, and developers to implement improvements and operational changes defined by leads and architects.
• Other duties as assigned

• Bachelor’s in STEM degree with 8 years of professional experience;
  Master’s in STEM degree with 6 years of professional experience;
  PhD with 3 years of experience. Will consider an additional 4+ years of experience in lieu of degree.
• Requires an active Top-Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearance at time of application
• Must have the ability to obtain and maintain U.S. Government Full Scope Polygraph.
• Relevant Dev Ops, site reliability, or systems engineering experience.
• Demonstrated experience maintaining Git Lab CI/CD in an on-prem environment
• Practical experience administering Nexus repositories
• Experience supporting Apache NiFi infrastructure
• Working knowledge of on-prem Kubernetes operations
• Experience using Grafana and…